Go Back In · Week 1 · Friday
The disagreement was about nothing. That is precisely what makes it impossible to fix.
Two neighbors, a volunteer committee, a decision that went one way instead of the other, and eight or nine sentences on a Saturday morning that came out sharper than either man meant them to. Nobody swore. Nobody stormed off. It was simply, unmistakably not fine, and then both of them went home and closed their doors.
That was April.
The respectable exit
He stopped going to the meetings. He told himself he was busy, and he was busy — that is what makes it work. Being busy is the most respectable exit available to a man who wants out of something and does not want to say so.
Then it spread, the way these things do. The wave from the driveway got shorter. Then it became a nod. Now the garage door starts coming down before he is fully out of the truck, and he does not think of that as avoiding anybody. He thinks of it as going inside.
The saw
The other man’s circular saw is still sitting on his workbench. Borrowed in March, before any of it, for a job that took one afternoon.
He has looked at that saw a hundred times. It is simultaneously the reason to walk over and the reason he cannot — because returning it now is not returning a tool. Four months in, handing it back means saying something about April, and he has never once come up with the something.
So it sits there, and every week it sits there it gets heavier, which is a strange thing for a saw to do.
Who moves first
There is a law in Leviticus about restoring a man who has been put outside the camp. Read who does the walking.
The priest is to go outside the camp to examine him, and if the skin disease of the afflicted person has healed,Leviticus 14:3 (BSB)
The one with the standing goes out. He does not wait at the gate for the man outside to present himself in acceptable condition, with an explanation ready.
Between neighbors, neither man has standing. That is exactly the trouble — there is no priest in this story, no one whose job it is to move first, and so the waiting can go on for years and feel entirely reasonable to both of them the whole time.
Saturday morning
He picks up the saw and walks four houses down and knocks, with nothing prepared, which is the only reason he is able to do it at all. Anything prepared would have needed another week of preparing.
When the door opens he says: I have had this since March. I have been avoiding you since April. I do not have a speech.
The disagreement is still there. Nothing about April gets resolved on that porch, the committee still voted the way it voted, and both men still think they were right about it.
It costs him the closed garage door, which was working.
That door was doing a job. It kept every Saturday simple. Now Saturdays have a man four houses down in them again, and some of those Saturdays are going to be awkward.
But two men are standing on a porch. For four months there was nobody on it.
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