We were at the kitchen table Labor Day morning when my wife closed the book she was reading, lifted the bamboo blinds and looked across the backyard. At that moment I was immersed in my own book, a memoir of suburban isolation and human helplessness so compellingly bleak I barely noticed her furrowing brow. “Um, what’s he doing?” she finally said. “Oh. No. He is not.”

“Hmm?” I mumbled. “Who’s not what?”

“The neighbor,” she barked. “He’s throwing garbage in our yard, over the fence!”

Until that morning we’d never had a problem with this particular neighbor. He doesn’t own a leaf blower or a weed whacker or a car stereo subwoofer, and unlike the guy whose woodsy compound sits cattycorner to ours, he has never fired a .22 into the camellia, trying to upend a rabbit.

And yet there he was, neighbor No. 1, lowering something massive over the fence while his young son gathered pinecones in his shadow. At first I couldn’t tell what the massive object even was, only that it was rusty and broken and not ours. “It’s a cafeteria table,” my wife finally decided. “And he threw an old bucket over, too. We need to say something.”

Now, I’ve been married long enough to know what “we need to say something” means. In this case, it meant I needed to confront the man we may be living beside for a very long time — and possibly get ambushed by his son. “I will,” I said before wandering to another window for an alternate view. “Why would he even think that’s OK?”

“Who cares?” said my wife. “It’s unacceptable.”

“It’s ridiculous,” I agreed.

“So are you going to say something?” she asked. “Or should I?”

The neighbor was preparing for a cookout, and I would have gladly helped him lug the table to the curb or even stored it, if he just needed it out of the way for the afternoon. But some people are programmed for denial, I guess, and when I asked if he planned to leave it on my side of the fence he waffled. “I think that’s still my property,” he said.

I could have lectured him at that point on the precise coordinates of the property line or even on the history of the fence, which a former neighbor threw up in 1982, partly crossing the boundary. I could have recited some Robert Frost and initiated a lively roundtable discussion. Or, I could have explained how none of that even matters, how you don’t toss trash over a fence, period. Not wanting to embarrass him, however, I took the high road.

“Sorry,” I said. “I think you’re mistaken.”

And so my neighbor had no choice. I lifted the table over, and his son dragged it to the back of their lot, where the fence posts vanish into a cluster of vines. As the boy let the thing fall into the dense green brush, I wiped my hands on my jeans and went inside.

Had the matter ended there, things would be fine. Unfortunately, one afternoon two months later we had the patio door open when I spied the neighbor boy and a girl from the cul-de-sac slinking through the leaves behind my compost heap. “Is it OK we’re back here?” I heard the girl ask her friend. “Whose property are we on?”

“It’s our property,” the boy assured her, sounding not a little like his old man. “Clear down to the street.”

He stepped into the open then and sliced a line through the air with his hand, my world and his father’s falling cleanly to either side. And that’s when my wife spotted the table. It was hard to see, hidden behind my garden and camouflaged by the camellia, but it was indisputably, confrontationally, unacceptably leaning against our side of the fence.

Craig Brandhorst is a freelance writer. To read more visit his blog at reconstructionfables.wordpress.com.