The man in the unit above mine flicked his cigarette butts onto my patio for two months, and when one came down still lit beside my nine-year-old granddaughter’s chair, he leaned on his railing, grinned, and said, “Tell her to sit inside, then.” So I quit asking him. I started getting ready instead.
My late husband Neil built the planter boxes on that patio the spring before his heart gave out.
Tomatoes on the left. Basil and peppers on the right.
Brielle helps me water them every Saturday while her mother works a double at the hospital.
That patio is the only part of the condo that still feels like him.
The first butt showed up in the basil.
I figured it blew off somebody’s ashtray, pinched it out of the dirt with a paper towel that had little blue roosters on it, and went on with my day.
Two weeks later there were four of them in the tomato box, pushed into the soil like somebody had aimed.
So I climbed the stairs and knocked on the door right over mine.
Kiran Shah opened it in his work polo, a ring of keys still in his hand.
I held out the paper towel.
“I think these are yours.”
He looked at the butts and winced.
“Oh, man. I’m sorry. I smoke out there when I get off shift and I’m not even paying attention.”
“It’s my husband’s garden.”
“I’ll get an ashtray. Seriously. You won’t see another one.”
He looked embarrassed, and I went back down feeling like a nosy old lady for bringing it up at all.
The next morning there was one in the peppers.
I didn’t say anything.
I gave it nineteen days.
Then I came out one evening and found a hole in my outdoor rug the size of a dime, black around the edges, with the butt still sitting in the middle of it.
That rug was eighty dollars.
I went up again.
“Your cigarette melted a hole in my rug,” I said.
He shrugged.
“It’s a cigarette, Martha. They go out.”
“This one went out IN MY RUG.”
He leaned on the doorframe like we were chatting about the weather.
“You’re on the ground floor. Stuff comes down. That’s kind of the deal.”
“Nothing’s coming down. You’re throwing it.”
He just smiled at me until I turned around and left.
The third time I never made it to his door.
It was a Saturday morning, and Brielle was out on the patio in her folding chair with a library book about volcanoes.
I was at the sink filling the watering can when she said, “Grandma?”
Not loud. Careful.
A butt was lying on the concrete about four inches from her sneaker, and it was still glowing.
She’d pulled both feet up onto the seat.
I went out and looked straight up.
Kiran was leaning over his railing in a hoodie, another cigarette already going in his hand.
“THAT LANDED NEXT TO HER FOOT,” I said.
He laughed.
Really laughed, looking down at the two of us.
“Tell her to sit inside, then.”
“She’s nine years old, Kiran.”
“Honestly? Be glad it’s only the butts.”
Then his slider shut.
I stood there with the watering can dripping on my slipper.
Brielle didn’t open her book again that day.
I’d lived in that building fourteen years.
I kept a spare key for the Patels in 1A.
I took in packages for half the second floor.
Last February, when Kiran’s water heater went at two in the afternoon, I was the one who let the plumber in and stood in his kitchen while the man worked so nothing walked off.
And he couldn’t find an ashtray.
But I knew exactly how it would go if I screamed at him in the hallway.
He’d tell the condo board the widow downstairs had a meltdown over some cigarette ends, and they’d all nod, because I’m sixty-three and I talk to my tomatoes.
So I stopped asking.
I started writing it down.
I keep a little notebook by the slider, the free kind the dentist hands out, and every butt went in it. The date. The time. Where it landed. Whether it was still lit.
Most nights it was 10:40, give or take.
Saturdays around nine.
By the end of the month I had thirty-one entries.
Twelve of them still burning.
My daughter Sonya asked why I didn’t just call the police.
“Because I don’t want him arrested,” I said. “I want him to get it.”
She looked at me like I’d lost my mind.
On Thursday I made one phone call.
I spent most of Friday afternoon setting things up.
Nothing that would break anything. Nothing anybody could call petty.
And NO MORE KNOCKING ON HIS DOOR.
Friday night I was out on the patio by 10:15 with every light off.
Phone in my lap.
The notebook on the little table.
And Efrain, sitting in Neil’s old chair beside me, a clipboard on his knee.
He hadn’t said ten words since he got there.
At 10:38 the door above us slid open.
The lighter clicked.
A little orange dot leaned out over the railing.
It dropped.
It bounced once on the concrete, right beside Brielle’s empty folding chair, still burning.
For two months I’d gotten up and gone for the paper towel.
Not this time.
Beside me, Efrain clicked his pen and stood up.
10:38
He wrote the time on the top line of the form on his clipboard. Then the word lit. He underlined it twice.
Efrain owns the unit above mine.
Kiran rents it from him, month to month, eleven hundred and fifty dollars. Efrain lives in Bowling Green, forty minutes south, and before Thursday I had seen him exactly once, in February, standing in our parking lot in a brown work coat, talking to the plumber I’d let in.
He’d called the building that day because Kiran wouldn’t pick up his phone, and my number was still on the emergency list from when Neil was on the board.
A week later a card came. A Kroger gift card inside, twenty-five dollars, and his cell number printed under his name in block capitals. Anything you ever need, Mrs. Foster.
That card had been on my refrigerator since February, under a magnet shaped like an ear of corn.
On Thursday I took it down.
Now I picked my phone up off my lap and took a picture of the orange dot beside the chair leg. The flash went off. I hadn’t meant it to.
Up above, nobody leaned out to look. The lighter clicked again.
Efrain bent down close to me. He smelled like the inside of a truck.
“Your slider open?”
“Yes.”
“Leave it open. Leave the lights off.” He tapped the clipboard against his leg. “I’m going up.”
He started for the corner of the building, then came back two steps.
“Whatever he says up there,” he said, “don’t you answer him.”
Rule 14(c)
Neil had his first heart attack in the summer of 2020.
The cardiologist told him two things. Lose thirty pounds, and stay away from smoke. He didn’t lose the thirty pounds.
But the smoke he went after.
At the time, the man in 1C smoked on his patio every evening, and it came straight in our screen. Neil was the board’s treasurer. He sat at our kitchen table with a legal pad and wrote out a rule for the whole building, and I typed it for him on the computer while he read each line out loud and changed his mind about commas.
No smoking on balconies, patios, or within twenty-five feet of any door.
A fine of one hundred dollars per violation, billed to the unit owner.
And the line he fought over the longest. A fine needs a written log from the person complaining and a signed statement from one witness who does not live in the complaining unit.
“So nobody can just make it up about somebody they don’t like,” he said.
It passed nineteen to four. The man in 1C moved to Arizona that winter. Neil said that was a coincidence and grinned when he said it.
Then, in the spring of 2023, he decided I needed a garden.
The patio is what the bylaws call a limited common element, which means it’s mine to use but the board’s to approve. So Neil did it the right way. He drew the boxes on graph paper, eight feet long, cedar, with the measurements, and turned it in at the April meeting.
They approved it in May. The minutes came in the mail to every owner in the building, the way they always do.
I threw mine out with the grocery circulars. Why would I keep it?
He built the boxes in the parking lot over two weekends. Brielle was six. He let her drive one screw into each corner with the drill, his hand over hers. Those four screws still sit a little crooked.
He planted the tomatoes on Memorial Day.
He died in October, in the recliner, with the ball game on.
So when I say that patio is the only part of the condo that still feels like him, I mean I can still see where his knees went into the grass when he was setting the boxes level.
I sat there in the dark now and looked at the crooked screws I couldn’t see.
Above me, somebody knocked on Kiran’s door. Three times, slow.
Desiree Shin’s dining table
I hadn’t gone straight to Efrain.
The Tuesday after Brielle’s Saturday, I took the notebook over to Desiree Shin in Building C. Desiree has been board president since Neil’s time. She’s seventy-four, she keeps butterscotch candies in a glass dish, and she calls everybody honey whether she likes them or not.
She put her reading glasses on and turned every page.
“This is good, Martha. Dates, times. This is a good log.”
“So you can fine him.”
“I can fine the owner.” She closed the notebook. “With a witness. Somebody who isn’t you, who sees it happen and signs. Neil’s rule. You know that better than me.”
I did know it. I’d typed it.
“The Patels go to bed at nine,” I said. “And it’s always after ten.”
Desiree took her glasses off and set them on the notebook. Then she got up and went to the sideboard and came back with a manila folder.
“Honey, he was here Sunday.”
She opened it and turned it around so I could read.
It was typed. Two pages. Dated the day after he’d laughed at Brielle.
Unit 2B wished to make a formal complaint against the resident of 1B. The resident of 1B had come to his door uninvited on two occasions to make accusations. The resident of 1B had shouted up at his unit in a loud and aggressive manner in front of a minor. The resident of 1B was maintaining unapproved wooden structures on a limited common element, filled with dry soil and mulch, directly beneath his balcony.
He’d written that he had personally seen the soil in those boxes smoking.
More than once.
“He’s the one smoking,” I said. “He’s dropping them in there.”
“I know that, and you know that. Now look at this part.”
He was asking the board to have the structures removed by December first.
“I went looking for Neil’s approval,” Desiree said. “Honey, it’s not there. Everything before 2024 was in the clubhouse basement when that pipe went. The binders were in boxes on the floor.”
“Everybody got the minutes in the mail.”
“Did you keep yours?”
I looked at the butterscotch dish.
“Then the board votes on it November fourth,” she said. “And I’m one vote of five.”
She turned to the second page so I could see how he’d signed off.
They should be removed before somebody gets hurt.
The ear of corn
Sonya came by after her shift that night and ate standing up at my counter.
I told her about the folder.
“Mom. Let them take the boxes.”
“Your father built those boxes.”
“I know who built them. I was there.” She put her fork down. “You’re going to go stand in front of five old people and fight a guy who works nights and has nothing better to do? He’ll show up with a lawyer cousin. Bring Brielle to my place on Saturdays. You can do tomatoes in pots on my porch.”
“Your porch faces north.”
“Mom.”
“I’m not putting your father’s garden in a dumpster because a man can’t find an ashtray.”
She said that was the most Dad thing she’d ever heard me say, and she didn’t mean it nicely.
After she left I stood in the kitchen for a long time.
I needed one person who didn’t live in 1B, who would sit on my patio after ten at night and sign their name to what they saw. The Patels were too old and too early. Half the second floor knew Kiran from the mailboxes, and I wasn’t going to ask anybody to make an enemy one floor up from their own bed.
And the fine went to the owner.
Every hundred dollars of it would land on a man who had sent me a gift card for standing in a kitchen.
I looked at that card under the corn magnet until about eleven. Then I went to bed.
On Thursday morning I took it down and called him.
He picked up on the second ring, out of breath. He was on a ladder somewhere.
I told him all of it. The basil. The rug. Brielle’s sneaker. The folder at Desiree’s.
He didn’t say a word until I was done.
“He told me in August he quit,” Efrain said. “Wanted fifty off the rent because the place didn’t smell anymore.”
“I’m sorry. I know it comes back on you.”
“My lease says the tenant pays any fine he causes. Paragraph nine. He signed it.” I heard the ladder creak. “These boxes. Your husband got them approved?”
“In May of 2023. Desiree can’t find it. I threw my copy out.”
He was quiet so long I thought the call had dropped.
“I keep every piece of paper that building ever mailed me,” he said. “Since 2011. It’s for my taxes. My wife says I’m going to die under it.”
“Can you find May of 2023?”
“Give me tonight,” he said. “And find me a chair for tomorrow.”
So on Friday I swept the patio twice. I put the rug back down with the burnt hole showing. I wiped off Neil’s chair, which nobody had sat in for three years, and put Brielle’s folding chair in the exact spot it had been on Saturday, four inches from where the butt had landed. I charged my phone. I put the notebook on the little table.
And at 10:38, Efrain went up.
Above us now, the door opened.
“Efrain? Man, it’s like eleven o’clock.”
The railing over my patio
“I was in the neighborhood,” Efrain said. “Let’s step outside. You’re going to want to smoke.”
I heard the slider go. Their feet on the balcony boards right over my head.
I’d lived under that balcony fourteen years. I know which board squeaks.
“You want a beer?” Kiran said. “I got some in the door.”
“No.”
“What’s going on? Is it the water heater again?”
“The board mailed me your complaint,” Efrain said. “About the lady downstairs. Owners get a copy.”
That I hadn’t known.
“Oh. Yeah. Okay.” Kiran sounded relieved. “Good. So you see what I’m dealing with.”
“Tell me.”
And he did.
He told it for a long time. I sat in the dark with my hands around the notebook and heard what I was.
“She comes up to my door in her bathrobe with garbage in a paper towel. Twice. She screams up here on a Saturday morning, the whole building hears it. She sits down there all day with the granddaughter, both of them staring up at my balcony like I’m a zoo. And she’s got these boxes. Wood boxes full of dead dirt, right under me. One spark and this whole side goes up.”
“One spark from where?” Efrain said.
Kiran laughed. The same laugh.
“From wherever, man.”
“You told me in August you quit.”
“I quit in the unit. Like you asked. Out here’s outside.”
“Out here’s against the rules of this building.”
“Nobody follows that. Come on.” The lighter clicked. “Look. Here’s the thing. You’re the owner. The board listens to owners, they don’t listen to renters. If you put your name on something saying those boxes are a hazard, they vote them out November fourth and she quits camping down there all day. I get off shift at ten-thirty. I want one cigarette without the neighborhood watch. That’s all I want.”
“And the butts.”
“What about them?”
“The ones in her dirt.”
Kiran was quiet a second. When he talked again he sounded pleased with himself.
“Honestly? I figured if enough of them landed in that dirt, it’d make my point for me.”
The board over my head squeaked.
Efrain said, “Martha. You can turn the light on now.”
I reached behind me and flipped the switch.
The patio lit up. The rug. The notebook. Brielle’s chair. The butt beside the leg, gray now, gone out.
Kiran looked straight down at me.
Paragraph nine
“Oh, you have GOT to be kidding me.”
He leaned so far over the railing that the ash fell off his cigarette and came down on the rug.
“She’s been sitting there? In the dark? Efrain, she’s been sitting down there in the dark listening to us? That’s insane. That’s actually insane. Do you hear how insane that is? You drove forty minutes for this? For her?”
“I drove forty minutes for this,” Efrain said.
He had the clipboard against the railing now, the patio light on his hands.
“This is a witness statement under Rule 14(c). It says on October twenty-third at 10:38 p.m. I saw a lit cigarette come off this balcony onto the patio of 1B. I signed it at 10:39. Under it is her log. Thirty-one dates. Twelve of them lit when they landed.”
“That’s her handwriting. She could write anything.”
“That’s why there’s a witness.”
“A hundred bucks a pop? For cigarette butts? That’s three grand. You’re not serious.”
“It’s three thousand one hundred dollars, and it bills to me,” Efrain said. “And paragraph nine of your lease bills it to you.”
Kiran laughed, but there wasn’t anything in it this time.
“Okay. Okay. So you’re taking her side. Over the guy who’s paid you eleven-fifty every single month for a year. On time. Every month.”
“Not in February.”
“What?”
“February your water heater went. I called you six times. You didn’t pick up. She did.” Efrain didn’t raise his voice once. “She stood in your kitchen two hours so nobody walked off with your TV. You know what she said when I tried to pay her? She said she didn’t want anything.”
“I didn’t ASK her to.”
“No,” Efrain said. “You didn’t.”
Kiran turned to me again.
“Martha. Martha, come on. You called my landlord? We could’ve just talked.”
I looked up at him.
“We did,” I said.
He opened his mouth and nothing came out of it.
A window slid open over to the left. Yael from 2C, in a T-shirt, her hair up. She looked down at me and then over at Kiran’s balcony.
“Everything okay out there?”
“Ask HER,” Kiran said. “She’s getting me thrown out. Sitting in the dark taking notes like the CIA.”
Yael looked at me a long time. Then she shut her window.
Efrain took one more sheet off the clipboard and held it out over the railing where Kiran could see it, and where I could too, in the light.
The paper was yellowed and had been folded in thirds to fit an envelope. Minutes of the regular meeting, May 9, 2023. Motion to approve two raised planter boxes, cedar, on the limited common element of Unit 1B, N. Foster, per attached drawing. Approved, 4-0.
“Second drawer of the third box in my basement,” Efrain said. “My wife says thank you for the excuse to clean it.”
“That’s a copy. That doesn’t mean anything.”
“It’s the board’s own paper, and I’ll hand it to Desiree Shin myself on Monday with this statement. And I’m giving you thirty days. You’re month to month.”
“You’re evicting me. Over HER.”
“I’m not renewing you. If you’re out by the first and you leave a check for her rug, I don’t file the fines.”
“And if I don’t?”
Efrain clicked his pen.
“Then I file every one of them.”
Kiran stood up off the railing. He looked down at the planter boxes, and at Brielle’s chair, and at me.
“Unbelievable,” he said. “Over some dirt.”
The slider shut so hard the glass shook in the frame.
The garlic
Kiran moved out the Saturday before Thanksgiving. He left a check for eighty dollars on my mat, with no note, made out to “1B.”
The board withdrew his complaint on the fourth. Desiree read the 2023 minutes into the record and gave me two butterscotch candies on my way out.
Yael doesn’t leave her packages with me anymore. Neither does the young couple in 2A. I see them at the mailboxes and they’re very polite.
The first Saturday in December, Sonya had another double, and Brielle and I were out on the patio in our coats.
The tomatoes had been pulled for weeks. Neil always put garlic in the left box over the winter, one clove every hand-width, pointy end up. So that’s what we were doing.
Brielle did the counting. I did the dirt.
The railing over us was empty, the balcony bare, a for-rent sign taped on the inside of the slider.
When the last clove was in, Brielle stood up and brushed off her knees. She looked up at the railing for a while.
Then she dragged her folding chair back to its spot by the box, sat down, put both sneakers flat on the concrete, and opened her book.
If there’s a woman in your building who keeps everybody’s spare keys and signs for everybody’s packages, go knock on her door this week and just say thank you.
For more family feuds where someone’s smug confidence may not last, read about the wedding barn and the pink receipt, the cabin deed and Trisha’s yellow flag, and the page her son-in-law hoped she wouldn’t read.
