Grandpa was always so proud of his creek. Called it the crown jewel of his farm, and said it was the best deal he’d ever gotten.

And rightly so. Whenever we came to visit for long summer weekends, my sisters and I spent hours swimming in the cool water, or fishing when we’d gotten tired of making a racket. There was a small pier, jutting out five yards, a mix of reliquary posts and newly sawn boards, always flying the Stars & Stripes. We liked to lay ourselves on it in the evenings and imagine we were floating, like the fireflies that came out to play as we counted the stars.

The only thing wrong with that spot was the smell from next door. Usually it wasn’t a problem, but now and then the wind would shift, and we’d gag on burnt rubber and…well, we weren’t sure what. But it didn’t smell normal. And sometimes we’d hear voices, too. Usually shouting, always angry.

One time, we saw kids. Black folks, a boy and a girl, fishing on our creek. My sisters screamed and hid behind the brush in their swimsuits, and the kids took off for the rubber lot when Grandpa’s dogs caught wind of them.

Grandpa always had the biggest dogs.

We grew up, as kids sometimes do, and moved on to college. Had kids of our own. As he got older, Grandpa had to let go of his farm, one piece at a time. Got too hard to maintain, and his knees and back couldn’t abide the tractor’s rattle, especially after Grandma passed and he didn’t have anyone to ease his pain. But he never quit tending the path to his creek, in case any of the grandkids–or great-grandkids–wanted to stop by.

When he finally went to Jesus, Dad asked me to settle the estate. I was better with the numbers and technicalities, Dad said. So I agreed, and I got a box full of yellowed paper for my trouble. Half the stuff wasn’t even in the will, so I did my best to be fair about it. That china set, the one Grandma used for Easters? Nowhere on Grandpa’s will, but Grandma had tucked the receipt in that box. Even marked it with Susan’s initials. Still taking care of things, ten years passed. I relied on her more than a few times to soothe things between Mom and the girls. I got pretty good at imitating Grandma’s handwriting, too.

The property map was something else, though. Hand-drawn back in the 1920s so far as I could tell, by some local yokel of a surveyor. No stamps, no seal. I’m not even sure they used stamps, back then. Or I wasn’t, until I drove to the courthouse and started digging through their records. Like I said, I’m a by-the-book kind of guy, and I didn’t want Dad to pay more or less than he deserved to on that old run-down farm. Dad said less was good by him, but he knew I wouldn’t play like that. It’s why he saddled me with divvying up the estate in the first place. Everyone loves to rag on the fair guy, because he’ll take it if it keeps the peace.

Anyway, it turns out the courthouse had all kinds of stamped maps. Official stuff, dating to the mid-1800s, even. I looked through them, hogging the big plastic folding tables in that musty room for the better part of a day, fitting the parcels from across the whole township in a layered, mismatched jigsaw puzzle.

And you know what I found? The border with the rubber lot wasn’t at Grandpa’s fence. It was the creek.

I know, I know. I did my homework. Checked a bunch of deeds, even read the calls. You want a headache? Try reading a country surveyor’s tiny handwritten numbers. Then try fifty surveyors’. Sure as sunset, Grandpa’s farm ended at that creek. Always had, ever since the land was mapped. It wasn’t until Grandpa bought it that the border shifted fifty yards south, as if by magic.

It took me another day’s searching to realize that the same year Grandpa got his great deal, a black man by the name of Jones bought the rubber lot.

I did a lot of navel-gazing that night, lying in bed next to my wife. No fireflies or stars to comfort me. Just a sinking, twisty feeling in my heart as I tried to work out how to tell the others that Grandpa’s creek was stolen goods. That by all rights, it was never his, and certainly wasn’t ours alone.

When I did tell Dad, he said to just not say anything. Just use a rough number for the damn taxes, and let bygones be bygones. We weren’t well-off, either, he said. And he was right: we’re not.

But we weren’t well-off, with a creek that wasn’t ours.

I haven’t spoken to Dad since then. He stopped picking up the phone, and I eventually quit trying.

But I did speak to Mr. Jones. Or his descendant, at least. On a hot summer day, hotter than it should’ve been, I drove out to Grandpa’s old farm. I went solo. The path to the creek was overgrown, with a post oak fallen across it a hundred yards from the bank. I chased the bugs away with my hat, but I got bitten and stung a dozen times before I made it to the water.

When I got there, a man was standing on the far bank, watching me. I didn’t recognize him, but I did recognize the resentment in his stiff posture. The suspicion in his glare, the way his dark fist tightened around the bucket he held. The way his eyes flicked to my hip, searching for a concealed weapon, before he spoke.

“You the new owner?”

I took a deep breath, but my heart and mind were already made up. Had been, the moment I learned the truth.

Like I said, I’m a by-the-Book kind of guy.

“Yes, and no,” I replied. “Can we talk?”

It wasn’t a warm welcome, nor should it have been. We’d lived next door, but we’d never been neighbors. Hell, I’d never actually been to the other side of the creek. Never met Kelvin Jones or his sister, because I don’t count that day Grandpa ran them off with his dogs. Never realized that without that creek, the Jones property had little more than rocky soil. Never knew, until I heard it to the south, that all that shouting was from the people on the far side of the lot, dropping burnt tires and lead paints next to the Jones’s spring. Never knew the county health department had been looking the other way for decades, while the Joneses drank poison.

But now I do. And now you do, too. Kelvin Jones and I may never be friends, but friendship isn’t what either of us needs. I’ve apologized, naturally, but apologies won’t get Kelvin his fair share of clean water. What we both need is access to that creek–our creek. I’ll talk to Dad again, or at least try to. See if he’ll trade me the old farm for whatever he’d set aside for me, before we fell out. If not, I guess I could always lean on Grandma’s farsighted labels one more time. And as for that toxic dump, it’ll take some old-fashioned work to get the county commission into action and have it hauled it off for good.

It won’t be easy. It may not even be honest, by a cheater’s standard. But it’s right.

And once we get that sorted out, who knows? Maybe that’ll be the end of it, and we’ll go back to quietly tracking each other across our shared border. But maybe, just maybe, that pier can become a bridge, and we could have a beer while our kids catch fireflies together.