“I saw it,” Dale said. “I was up in the bucket. I was about to cut that branch. And I saw it. And I thought, that’s somebody’s kid. Somebody’s kid climbed all the way up here.” He swallowed. “I almost stopped. Right then. I almost came down and said I wasn’t doing this.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Dale looked at the ground.
“Because I’m a coward,” he said. “Because she was paying cash. Because I needed the money.” He looked up. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’ve been sick about it all night.”
He reached into the pocket of his flannel shirt.
He pulled something out.
He held it out to Jeff. Across the fence.
It was a piece of wood. About the size of a deck of cards. Gray bark on one side. Pale wood on the other.
Carved into the bark, in shaky, deep letters, cut with a pocketknife by an eighteen-year-old boy at five o’clock in the morning before he left for college:
J.H. 1997.
Jeff took it.
He held it in both hands. He looked at it for a long time.
“I cut it out of the branch,” Dale said. “Last night. At the yard. Before the chipper. I didn’t know whose it was. I just couldn’t let it go in the chipper.”
Jeff didn’t say anything.
He reached across the fence and shook Dale’s hand. Hard. For a long time.
Pam was still standing in her doorway.
In her pink silk bathrobe. Holding the orange notice. Shaking.
“This is insane,” she whispered. “This is insane. Over a tree. Over leaves.”
The police officer stepped forward. He’d been quiet the whole time.
“Ms. Whitaker,” he said. “I’m Officer Delgado. I need to ask you some questions about yesterday. About entering the property at 214 Birchwood with the tree crew. Would you like to do that here, or at the station?”
Pam stared at him.
“You’re arresting me?”
“No, ma’am,” Officer Delgado said. “Not today. I’m taking a report. The DA will review it and decide whether to file charges. Criminal trespass. Criminal mischief. It’ll depend on the total value of the damage.”
He looked across the fence. At the stump. At the sawdust. At the broken pieces of the treehouse in the grass.
“From what I’m hearing,” he said, “the value is going to be pretty significant.”
Pam looked at me.
Across the white vinyl fence. Over the stump. Past her perfect blue pool with the waterfall feature and the underwater lights.
Her face crumpled.
“Why?” she said. Her voice cracked. “Why would you do this? Why would you call all these people? Over a tree? It’s just a tree, Linda!”
I looked at her for a long time.
“You’re right, Pam,” I said. “Trees grow back.”
She stared at me.
“That’s what you told me yesterday,” I said. “Trees grow back. Husbands don’t.”
I held up Tom’s broken wind chime. I’d brought it out with me. I don’t know why. I just picked it up off the kitchen counter on my way out the door.
“My husband planted that tree six hours after our son was born,” I said. “He watered it every night for forty-six years. Even when he had an oxygen tube in his nose. He applied to the city to protect it. Twenty years ago. He never told me. He just did it. Quietly. In case somebody like you ever came along.”
My voice was shaking now.
“And he left me a letter,” I said. “In that folder. He told me exactly what to do if anybody ever cut it down. He said don’t yell. Don’t cry in front of them. Don’t give them the satisfaction. Just say okayand go inside. And then call Marisol.”
I looked at Marisol. She was standing in Pam’s driveway with her baseball cap in her hands again. Her eyes were wet.
“So I did,” I said.
“Trees grow back,” I said again. “You’re right. It’ll take forty-six years. And I’m seventy-two. So I won’t see it.”
I looked at the stump.
“But Tom made sure that whoever cut it down would have to pay for the new ones,” I said. “Every inch. A thousand dollars an inch. Thirty-one of them.”
I looked back at Pam.
“Tom was a shop teacher,” I said. “He always said measure twice, cut once.” I swallowed. “You should have measured, Pam.”
That’s what happened.
That’s what some of my neighbors think was too far.
Some of them said so.
Mrs. Henderson across the street came over a few days later with a plate of lemon bars. She sat at my kitchen table and said, very carefully, “Linda, honey. Thirty-one thousand dollars. And the police. Isn’t that a little much? Over a tree? She’s going to lose her house.”
“She’s not going to lose her house,” I said.
“How do you know?”
“Because I’m not finished,” I said.
Mrs. Henderson looked at me like I’d lost my mind.
Others didn’t say anything to my face. But I heard. Cedar Hollow is a small town. Word travels.
Linda Harmon called the cops on her neighbor over a tree.
Did you hear she’s suing for thirty thousand dollars?
That poor woman. She just wanted to swim.
And some of them, I’ll be honest, sided with Pam. They’d seen the notes too. YOUR TREE IS A NUISANCE. They thought I should’ve trimmed it back years ago. They thought I was being sentimental. Holding on to a tree because I couldn’t hold on to my husband.
Maybe they were right about that last part.
Pam didn’t speak to me for three weeks.
She hired a lawyer. A man from Portland in an expensive suit. He sent the city a letter saying the fine was excessive and the ordinance was unconstitutional and his client was the victim of a vindictive neighbor.
The city sent back a letter saying the ordinance had been upheld in court twice, in 2011 and 2018, and the hearing would be on August twenty-first.
Pam’s lawyer stopped returning her calls after that. I heard. Small town.
I didn’t hire a lawyer.
I didn’t need to. It wasn’t my case. It was the city’s.
But I went to the hearing.
It was in a small room at City Hall. Fluorescent lights. Folding chairs. A long table at the front with three people behind it. A hearings officer, a retired judge named Harriet Cho. Raymond Ellis from Code Enforcement. And Marisol.
Pam sat on one side. Alone. Her lawyer didn’t come.
She looked different. She wasn’t wearing a linen sundress. She was wearing jeans and a plain blue blouse. No sunglasses. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail.
She looked tired. She looked older.
She looked like she hadn’t been sleeping.
Raymond Ellis presented the city’s case. The certificate. The code. The survey. The measurements. Marisol’s photographs. Dale’s signed work order with the heart over the i.
Then Judge Cho asked if anybody else wanted to speak.
I stood up.
I hadn’t planned to. My knees were shaking.
I walked to the front of the room. I stood at a little podium with a microphone that squealed when I got too close.
I unfolded Tom’s letter.
And I read it out loud.
All of it. Lin, if you’re reading this, somebody’s done something to our tree. Probably that woman next door with the pool.
Some people in the back of the room laughed when I read that part. A few of my neighbors had come. Jeff. Mrs. Henderson. The young couple from 210.
I read the whole thing. Don’t give them the satisfaction. Just say okay and go inside. Watch for the red buds.
When I was done, the room was very quiet.
I looked across the room at Pam.
She was looking at the floor. Her hands were clasped tight in her lap. Her knuckles were white.
“Your Honor,” I said to Judge Cho. “I’d like to ask for something.”
Judge Cho looked at me over her glasses.
“Go ahead, Mrs. Harmon.”
“I’d like the fine reduced,” I said.
The whole room turned and looked at me.
Pam’s head snapped up.
“I’m sorry?” Judge Cho said.
“The thirty-one thousand dollars,” I said. “I’d like it reduced. Or waived. If that’s possible.”
Raymond Ellis frowned. Marisol looked at me with her eyebrows raised.
“Mrs. Harmon,” Judge Cho said slowly. “You’re the injured party. Your property was damaged. Your husband’s tree was destroyed. Why would you ask for the penalty to be reduced?”
I took a breath.
“Because I don’t want her money,” I said. “Thirty-one thousand dollars won’t bring back the tree. It won’t bring back Tom. It won’t bring back my son’s initials or my grandchildren’s treehouse.” I looked at Pam. “I don’t want her to lose her house. I don’t want her to go to jail.”
“Then what do you want?” Judge Cho asked.
I looked at Pam.
“I want her to plant the new one,” I said. “With me. With her own hands. In the dirt.”
Pam stared at me.
Her mouth opened. Nothing came out.
“The code says replacement trees,” I said. “Thirty-one inches of them. I’d like one of them to be a sugar maple. In my front yard. Where Tom’s was. And I’d like Pam to plant it. Not a tree crew. Not her pool guy. Her.”
I looked at Judge Cho.
“And I’d like her to water it,” I said. “Every night. For the first summer. With a hose. The way Tom did.”
The room was dead silent.
Judge Cho looked at me for a long time. Then she looked at Pam.
“Ms. Whitaker,” she said. “Do you have anything to say?”
Pam didn’t say anything.
She was crying.
Not loud. Just tears running down her face. She wasn’t wiping them away. She just sat there in her plain blue blouse with her hands clasped in her lap and cried.
“Ms. Whitaker?” Judge Cho said gently.
Pam stood up.
She walked to the front of the room. To the little podium where I was still standing.
She stood next to me.
She didn’t look at the judge. She looked at me.
“Why?” she whispered.
I didn’t answer right away.
I thought about it.
I thought about her standing on her side of the fence with her glass of iced tea. Trees grow back. Husbands don’t.
I thought about the way she’d said it. Not cruel, exactly. Flat. Bitter. Like something she’d said to herself a hundred times.
“Because of what you said,” I told her.
“Trees grow back?”
“No,” I said. “The other part. Husbands don’t.”
Pam flinched.
“I’ve been thinking about it for five weeks,” I said. “Every night. Lying in bed. Husbands don’t. The way you said it. Like you knew. Like it was something you learned the hard way.”
Pam closed her eyes.
“Who was he?” I asked quietly.
She told me.
Right there. At a podium in a hearing room at City Hall. In front of a judge and a code enforcement officer and a city forester and half of Birchwood Lane.
His name was Richard. They were married twenty-six years. In Sacramento. He was a dentist. She was a dental hygienist in his office. They had a daughter, Kelsey.
Four years ago, Richard left. For the receptionist. She was twenty-nine.
He took the practice. He took the house in Sacramento. He took the friends, most of them. And he took Kelsey too, in a way. Kelsey was twenty-four. Kelsey said her mother was bitter and impossible to be around and moved in with Richard and the receptionist.
Pam got a settlement. Enough for a fresh start. She picked Cedar Hollow off a map. She’d never been here. She liked the name.
She built the big gray house. And the pool.
“Kelsey used to love to swim,” Pam said. Her voice was shaking. “When she was little. She was on a swim team. She was so fast. I used to sit in the bleachers at every meet and scream my head off.”
“I built that pool for her,” Pam said. “For when she visits. I thought, if I have a really nice pool, she’ll come. She’ll bring her friends. She’ll bring her kids someday. She’ll want to be there.”
She wiped her face with her hand.
“She’s never come,” Pam said. “Not once. In three years. She doesn’t answer my calls. She texts me on my birthday. HBD Mom. That’s it.”
She looked at the floor.
“So I clean the pool,” she said. “Every day. I keep it perfect. Not a leaf. Not a bug. Not a speck of dirt. I check the chlorine twice a day. I run the waterfall every evening. I turn on the lights.”
Her voice broke completely.
“In case she comes,” Pam whispered.
I put my hand over my mouth.
Every day. Every single day. A perfect pool. With nobody in it.
And every day, my tree dropped leaves into it.
Hundreds of them. Green ones in summer. Red ones in fall.
Every leaf, a reminder that nobody was coming.
“And every day,” Pam said, “I’d look over the fence at your yard. And there’d be kids in that tree. Your grandkids. Screaming and laughing. Climbing up to that stupid treehouse. And you’d be sitting on your porch watching them. And your husband would be out there with his hose.” She was sobbing now. “And I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand looking at it. A whole family. In a tree. Right next to my empty pool.”
She looked at me.
“When your husband died,” she said, “I thought, good. Now she knows. Now she knows what it’s like to lose somebody and have to keep living next to the thing that reminds you.”
She put her face in her hands.
“That’s what I meant,” she said through her fingers. “Husbands don’t. I wasn’t talking about yours. I was talking about mine.”
Nobody in that room said anything for a long time.
Judge Cho took off her glasses and wiped them on her sleeve.
Marisol was looking out the window.
Behind me, I heard Jeff blow his nose.
“Pam,” I said finally.
She lowered her hands.
“I’m not going to tell you it’s okay,” I said. “What you did. It’s not okay. You lied to Dale. You trespassed on my property. You cut down a tree my husband planted on the day our son was born. You broke Tom’s wind chime.” My voice shook. “You destroyed something I can never get back.”
“I know,” she whispered.
“But I know what it’s like,” I said. “To keep something perfect for somebody who isn’t coming. I set out two coffee cups every morning for three months after Tom died. Every morning. And then I’d put one back in the cupboard. Every single morning.”
Pam looked at me.
“I still sleep on his side of the bed,” I said. “Because his pillow still smells like him. A little. Not as much as it used to.”
Pam’s face crumpled.
“So I’m not going to take your house,” I said. “And I don’t want your thirty-one thousand dollars.”
I turned to Judge Cho.
“I want her to plant the tree,” I said. “That’s all.”
Judge Cho looked at me for a long time.
Then she looked at Raymond Ellis. Then at Marisol.
Marisol nodded. Just slightly.
Judge Cho put her glasses back on.
“In thirty-one years on the bench and six as a hearings officer,” she said, “I’ve never had an injured party ask for the penalty to be reduced so the violator could do yard work.”
Somebody in the back laughed.
“The code allows the City Forester discretion on replacement,” Judge Cho said. “And it allows me discretion on the civil penalty in cases of extraordinary circumstances.” She looked at Pam over her glasses. “I’d say a widow asking me to let you plant her husband’s tree qualifies as extraordinary.”
She wrote something on her paper.
“Civil penalty reduced to five thousand dollars,” she said. “Payable to the Cedar Hollow Urban Forestry Fund. Replacement trees totaling thirty-one inches of trunk diameter, species and locations to be determined by the City Forester. One of which shall be a sugar maple, planted by Ms. Whitaker personally, at 214 Birchwood Lane, at the location of Heritage Tree #47.” She looked up. “And watered by Ms. Whitaker personally. Daily. Through September thirtieth.”
She looked at me.
“Is that satisfactory, Mrs. Harmon?”
“Yes, Your Honor,” I said. “Thank you.”
“And Mr. Jessup,” Judge Cho said, looking at Dale in the back row. “Your share.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I understand from Ms. Vega that you’ve already volunteered to grind the stump and prepare the planting site at no charge. And provide the replacement trees at cost.”
Dale nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Good,” Judge Cho said. “Then I’ll waive yours.”
She banged her gavel.
We planted it on the first Saturday in October.
Dale ground out the old stump the week before. He brought in a truckload of good topsoil. He did it himself. He wouldn’t take a penny.
Marisol picked out the tree herself. A sugar maple. From Fredrickson’s Nursery on Route 43. The same place Tom bought the first one.
Old Mr. Fredrickson died in 2008. His granddaughter runs it now. She walked Marisol through every sugar maple on the lot. Marisol picked the one that was already starting to turn red.
“For Tom,” she said.
It was taller than the one Tom planted. Eight feet. Marisol said that was the biggest one we could plant without a crane.
The trunk was about as thick as my wrist.
Everybody came.
Jeff. And Karen, his wife. And Noah and Ruby. Ruby brought a sign she’d painted. On a piece of wood. She’d been working on it for a week.
Marisol came in her khaki pants and her baseball cap. Dale came with his shovel. Officer Delgado came on his day off, in jeans. Even Judge Cho came. She said she wanted to see how it turned out.
Half of Birchwood Lane came. Mrs. Henderson with lemon bars. The young couple from 210 with their baby. The beagle that howls at the mailman.
And Pam.
She came across the lawn from her house in jeans and an old sweatshirt and a pair of brand-new gardening gloves with the tags still on them.
She’d never planted a tree in her life. She told me later. She’d never even planted a flower.
She stood at the edge of the hole. Dale had dug it. Exactly where the old stump had been. In the middle of my front yard. Twenty feet from the house.
She looked down into it.
She looked at me.
“I don’t know how to do this,” she said.
“Neither did Tom,” I said. “The first time. He figured it out.”
Dale showed her how.
How to take the burlap off the root ball. How to set it in the hole. Not too deep. How to check that it was straight. How to backfill the dirt. How to tamp it down with her feet. How to make a little moat around the base to hold the water.
Pam did all of it.
She got dirt on her jeans. Dirt on her sweatshirt. Dirt on her face. She broke a nail and didn’t even notice.
When she was done, she stood back and looked at it.
A little sugar maple. Eight feet tall. Leaves already turning red at the tips. Standing in the middle of my front yard where Tom’s had stood for forty-six years.
“Is it straight?” she asked.
Dale looked at it. He squinted.
“Close enough,” he said.
Jeff came forward.
He was holding something. The piece of wood Dale cut out of the branch. J.H. 1997.
He knelt down at the base of the new tree. He dug a small hole in the fresh dirt next to the trunk. With his hands.
He set the piece of wood in it. Bark side up. So you could see the letters.
He covered it with dirt. He patted it down.
“So it’s part of it,” he said quietly. “So it remembers.”
Ruby put her sign next to it. Stuck in the ground on a wooden stake. Painted in bright red letters.
THIS IS GRANDPA’S TREE. IT GROWS BACK.
Then I took out the wind chime.
Tom’s wind chime. With the cardinal that looked like a potato.
I’d taken it to Dale. In August. After the hearing. I didn’t know who else to ask. Dale’s a woodworker on the side. He makes furniture in his garage.
He fixed the cardinal. Glued the crack with wood glue and clamped it for a week. You can still see the line. But it held.
He straightened the brass tubes. He couldn’t get the dents out of two of them. So he cut new ones. From brass pipe he bought at the hardware store. They’re a little shinier than the old ones. They sound a little different.
He restrung the whole thing. With fishing line. Twenty-pound test. He said it’d hold through a hurricane.
He wouldn’t take any money for that either.
I couldn’t reach the lowest branch. The tree was too small. The branches were too high and too thin.
So I held the wind chime out.
To Pam.
She looked at it. Then at me.
“Me?” she said.
“You’re taller,” I said.
She took it.
She reached up. On her toes. She looped the fishing line around the lowest branch. Carefully. Gently. So it wouldn’t hurt the bark.
She let go.
The wind chime swung. Back and forth. Slowly.
Then the wind picked up. A little October breeze off the river.
Ting. Ting-ting.
Pam put her hand over her mouth.
She stood there under the little sugar maple with dirt on her face and listened to it.
Ting. Ting-ting.
“It sounds like somebody’s out here,” she whispered.
“It does,” I said. “That’s why I hung it.”
She watered it every night.
Every single night. Through October. Through September of the next year, when the hearing order ran out. And after.
She’d come across the lawn at seven o’clock with a hose she bought specially. Green. A hundred feet. Long enough to reach from her spigot over the fence to my yard.
She’d stand there for twenty minutes. Watering. Sometimes she’d sit in a lawn chair. Tom’s old lawn chair. I gave it to her.
Sometimes I’d come out and sit with her.
We’d talk. About Tom. About Richard. About Kelsey. About Jeff and Karen and the grandkids. About the beagle that howls at the mailman.
Sometimes we didn’t talk at all. We just listened to the wind chime.
She called Kelsey in November.
She told me about it the next night. Sitting in Tom’s lawn chair with the hose.
“I told her everything,” Pam said. “About the tree. About the hearing. About you. About planting it. About the watering.”
“What did she say?”
Pam was quiet for a moment.
“She said, ‘Mom, that doesn’t sound like you,’” Pam said. “And I said, ‘I know. That’s the point.’”
She laughed softly.
“She asked if she could see it,” Pam said. “The tree. She asked if she could come for Christmas.”
I didn’t say anything. I just reached over and took her hand.
Kelsey came for Christmas.
She was twenty-eight. Pam’s eyes. Pam’s chin. She brought her boyfriend, a quiet young man named Diego who works for the Forest Service in California.
Diego stood in my front yard on Christmas Eve and looked at the little sugar maple. Bare now. Just branches. With a wind chime and a hand-painted sign.
“Heritage Tree,” he said. “My dad’s been trying to get the city of Fresno to adopt a program like that for fifteen years.”
“Marisol could help him,” I said. “She knows everybody.”
Kelsey stood next to her mother. She looked at the tree for a long time.
Then she looked over the fence. At Pam’s pool. Covered for the winter. A blue tarp stretched tight over the water.
“You built that for me,” she said quietly. “Didn’t you?”
Pam didn’t answer.
“Dad told me,” Kelsey said. “He said you were probably sitting in Oregon with a pool nobody swims in. He said it like a joke.” She swallowed. “I thought it was a joke.”
Pam’s face crumpled.
Kelsey put her arms around her mother.
They stood there in my front yard on Christmas Eve under a little bare maple tree with a wind chime.
Ting. Ting-ting.
That was two years ago.
Jeff and Karen had a baby last May.
A girl. Margaret. After Tom’s mother. We call her Maggie.
Eight pounds, two ounces. Bald as an egg. Screaming her head off.
Jeff held her for the first time and cried so hard the nurse had to take the baby back.
Then, about six hours after she was born, Jeff kissed Karen on the forehead and said, “I’ll be back. There’s something I have to do.”
He drove to Fredrickson’s Nursery on Route 43.
He bought a sapling. A sugar maple. No taller than me. With a trunk about as thick as my thumb.
He drove it to his house in Salem. He dug a hole in the front yard. He planted it. He tied it up with one of Tom’s old neckties that I gave him after the funeral.
Then he drove back to the hospital with dirt on his knees.
Karen told me the rest.
She said Jeff walked into her room and she said, “Where have you been? You smell like fertilizer.”
And Jeff sat down on the edge of her hospital bed and looked at Maggie asleep in the little plastic bassinet.
“So the girl has something to climb,” he said.
I cried for an hour when Karen told me that.
The little maple in my front yard is twelve feet tall now.
It grew four feet in two years. Marisol says that’s extraordinary. She says sugar maples don’t grow that fast.
“Somebody loves this tree,” she said.
Somebody does.
Two somebodies.
Pam still waters it. Every night in the summer. With her long green hose. Sitting in Tom’s lawn chair.
Kelsey comes every summer now. For two weeks in July. She and Diego. They swim in Pam’s pool every day. Diego’s teaching himself to dive off the waterfall feature. He’s terrible at it.
In June, Noah and Ruby came over to swim too. Pam invited them. Ruby did a cannonball off the edge and soaked Pam’s whole lounge chair. Pam laughed so hard she cried.
Leaves fall in the pool every day. From my maple. Little ones. Green in summer. Red in fall.
Pam skims them out with a net.
She doesn’t complain anymore.
She says she likes them. She says it means the tree is growing.
Some of my neighbors still think I went too far.
They say I shouldn’t have called the city. They say I shouldn’t have let the police get involved. They say I should’ve just let it go. A tree’s a tree.
Mrs. Henderson said it again last month. Over lemon bars. “Linda, you put that poor woman through the wringer. Thirty-one thousand dollars. The police. A hearing. In front of everybody.”
“I didn’t put her through anything,” I said. “Tom did. Twenty years ago. With a form from the city.”
“But you made the call.”
“I did,” I said. “And I’d make it again.”
“Why?”
I thought about it.
“Because if I hadn’t,” I said, “Pam would have won. And she’d have gone back to her perfect, empty pool. And she’d have kept it clean every day for a daughter who wasn’t coming. And she’d have looked over the fence at a stump where my family used to be. And she’d have thought, good.”
I looked out my kitchen window. At the little maple. At the wind chime.
“And I’d have sat in my kitchen,” I said, “listening to nothing.”
Tom used to say measure twice, cut once.
He said it to every kid in his shop class for thirty-four years. He said it to Jeff when they built the treehouse. He said it to me when I was trying to hem a pair of pants.
I thought it was about wood.
It wasn’t.
It was about everything.
Pam cut once without measuring. She looked at a tree and saw leaves in her pool. She didn’t measure what it was. Forty-six years. A boy’s initials at the top. Two grandkids in a treehouse. A man with an oxygen tube in his nose, sitting in a lawn chair with a hose.
She cut.
And then I had a choice. I could cut too. Thirty-one thousand dollars. Criminal charges. Make her lose everything. Make her pay.
Or I could measure.
I could look at her standing on her side of the fence with her glass of iced tea and actually see her. Trees grow back. Husbands don’t. I could hear what she was really saying. A woman with an empty pool and a daughter who wouldn’t call.
I measured.
And then I cut.
But not the way she did.
I cut the fine. I cut the charges. I cut it all down to one thing.
A shovel. A tree. A hose.
Every night. Through September.
It’s October again.
The little maple in my front yard is turning red. Not orange. Not yellow. Red. Bright, burning, fire-engine red.
People are starting to drive down Birchwood Lane again. Slowing down. Looking.
It’s not as big as Tom’s was. Not yet. It won’t be for a long time. I’ll be gone before it is.
But it’s red.
And there’s a wind chime on the lowest branch. With a cardinal that looks like a potato. And two brass tubes that are shinier than the others.
And there’s a hand-painted sign at the base. Faded now. Ruby wants to repaint it.
THIS IS GRANDPA’S TREE. IT GROWS BACK.
Last night, I stood at my kitchen sink washing dishes.
I looked out the window.
At the little maple. Red leaves in the porch light.
At Pam. Sitting in Tom’s lawn chair. With her long green hose. Watering it. Even though it’s October and it doesn’t need it anymore.
She saw me in the window.
She waved.
I waved back.
The wind picked up.
Ting. Ting-ting.
It sounds like he’s still out there.
Puttering around in the front yard. Fixing something. Whistling.
And sometimes, if I listen really carefully, I think I can hear him saying it.
The thing he said on October 14, 1979. With dirt on his knees and a big stupid grin on his face.
So the boy has something to climb.
He does, Tom.
So does the girl.
So do all of us.
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