We talk through the fence

The house I'm in is my father's house. He signed it over in 2014, the year before he went, and he said the condition out loud in the front room with his two brothers sitting right there, which where we're from is the same as notarized. The family stays in it. My mother's in that same front room now, on the rented bed, and my wife and me have the back, and there's four kids in the other two rooms, and the boy's supposed to be out on his own by twenty three, which was my father's number, I don't know where he got it.

On this street it's my cousin Sef in the yellow house on the corner. Not Sef the one at the Sheriff's, the other Sef, his mother and my mother are first cousins out of Leone. Two doors down from him is his wife's brother. The stucco one with the boat under the blue tarp belongs to my auntie and she rents it to the Tuilagis, who are church, and who are related to us on my father's side, though I couldn't sit here and draw you the line on it anymore, somebody could, my auntie could.

Sef's got the Ring on his porch. It's pointed down his own driveway but it takes in mine and the sidewalk out front, and he'll text me off it. Hey uso, your boy got in at one thirty. He does that with everybody's kids. He sent the faifeau one time about a car that was sitting.

I'm on the night gang down at the harbor. We let go at three and I'm through my door at twenty past, twenty five if I stop at the Chevron on Avalon. Kids are up at six. I've never been able to lay down right after a shift, my body won't do it, my father was the same way and he'd sit out front in the dark with the radio going in the truck until my mother put a stop to it over the battery.

I'm still casual. Seventeen years of going down to the hall in Wilmington and plugging in and taking what they hand me. My cousin got his B book in 2019 and I was glad for him, I am glad for him. The A card's a different thing and I've been told two or three times now that it's coming, and my wife stopped asking about it a while back, which I appreciate about her.

The guy next door came in around 2017, out of Long Beach, off Anaheim where most of them are. His wife left him in 2023. I know the month because it was the same weekend as White Sunday practice and every kid on this street was up at the church until nine at night, and my girl had the two lines to say and couldn't get the second one.

Couple weeks after that I come home and he's at the curb at three in the morning trying to get a king mattress up on his shoulder by himself, got his knee under it. I set my coffee on the hood and took the other end. Then we stood out there a while. I had to be up at six.

The fence between us is chain link, about four foot, the diamond wire. There's a gate in it my father put in for the Fuimaonos who had that house before, which neither one of us has ever had open, there's a wire twisted on it, and the posts on my end are going at the bottom where the sprinkler hits them.

We talk about nothing. I mean nothing. It's his tires. The forty one dollar permit the city made him pull on his water heater, he was still laughing about that one in March, and my girl's braces, that's a big one, twenty two hundred out of pocket even on my wife's plan from the dental office, and what the refinery's burning off on a Tuesday, and the planes coming over out of Long Beach, which he counts, he says there's more of them since they changed something.

He smokes and I smoke out there with him. My wife thinks I quit in 2019 and I let her keep thinking it. The pack lives in the door of the truck.

He's a small guy, maybe a buck forty. He hangs both arms over the top rail when he's talking, and I've never once seen him put a jacket on out there no matter what it's doing, and it gets cold down here at three in the morning, cold enough I've got the hood up, and he's standing there in a t-shirt telling me about a light on his dash.

He's got lemongrass along his side and some chilis. The lime tree's mostly sticks now. He'll pass stuff over the top of the wire, fish off his grill still in the foil.

My wife likes it, she says his is better than what we do, and she'll ask me who gave it to us and I say the guy next door. His name's on the water bill, it's on the mail I carried in for him the week he went up to Fresno for a funeral.

Thursdays I run the men's at the church, my father had it before me and the faifeau asked me about a year after the funeral, which I think he'd been told to do. Fifteen of us, sometimes eight. We read something and we eat, and then it's who needs what, somebody's roof, somebody's fa'alavelave, and I do the closing prayer, and Sundays I've got the plate, left side, back half, since I was twenty three.

At a funeral I don't sit in the white plastic ones. They bring out a metal folding chair and everybody knows what it's for and nobody makes anything of it, and that's since one of the plastic ones went out from under me at my uncle's in 2011. Hallways I go through sideways. The metal one lives in the back of the hall behind the tables.

In February he asked would I come in and look at a leak he had under his sink. It's the same sink as ours, same house, they put the whole block up in 1957 off of three plans and my auntie's is that same one flipped. I said I had to go. Then I went in my house and stood in the kitchen with my jacket still on.

He put that water heater in himself. Took him one Saturday. I watched him walk the old one out to his truck alone and I called over and he said he had it.

We haven't talked about February. Not once, and it's seven months. He was out there the next night same as always and I came out, and we talked about the Rams. I don't even follow the Rams. Sef's boy does, he had the jersey with the name on the back and then they cut the guy.

It's four nights a week now, give or take. His back porch light being off means he's down, and I can see that light from the driveway before I'm even out of the truck.

Sef texted me in July off the camera. Uso you was out there till four thirty, everything good. I wrote back yeah all good, tire thing. After that I started putting the truck on the other side of the driveway so I'm standing behind it, because whatever goes in that camera my auntie has it by Sunday and my uncle's side has wanted this house back since the day my father signed it, and it's nothing, Sef asks everybody that, he asked the Tuilagis about their dog.

Anyway Sef's brother in law is taking the back unit behind the yellow house in November, so that's four more of them on this street by Christmas. His wife's the one who does the flowers at the church, and she's related to my wife through the Salanoas, which I only found out at a birthday in July.

Last Tuesday he didn't come out. Light was on so I know he was up in there. I had one and then I had another one, and then the light came on at the back of my house, which is my mother getting up to use the bathroom, and I put it out on the top rail and the butt went in my jacket pocket, because my wife takes the yard trash out on Saturdays.

He put a new post in on his end over the summer, when I was on days for a week and wasn't out there nights. Sunk it himself, bag of Quikrete out of the Home Depot on Main. He set it about a foot over into his own yard instead of on the line, so there's a strip of his grass sitting on my side of the wire now and I mow it, it's two passes. The bag's still leaning on his shed with the top rolled down, those are six dollars something. I've got to get the trailer off the side before November because of Sef's brother in law, and my mother's got the fourteenth, and the fourteenth's a Thursday so that's a whole other thing.