The Row With His Name On It

The Picture

On the Friday after Thanksgiving I got home from a twelve-hour shift at a quarter past seven. I sat down on the couch in my scrubs and opened my phone, the way you do when you are too tired to get up and too wound up to sleep.

The first thing on the screen was a picture from Kim. Kim works the front desk in our lab. She is a grandmother of five and a nice woman and she posts everything.

It was her grandkids, all bundled up, standing around a fat Fraser fir on a sled. Behind them was a red pole barn I had painted myself with a roller on a broom handle.

And beside the tree, grinning, holding a bow saw, was Kurt.

Under it Kim had written: “Tree day at Kurt Thorson’s farm! He planted every one of these himself. Best tree we ever had, and only $65. Support local!”

I looked at that picture until my phone went dark in my hand. Then I tapped it awake and looked at it again.

Last weekend. He had been open since before Thanksgiving.

I sat there doing the math. I did not want to, but I work in a lab and my brain does numbers whether I ask it to or not. Two weekends and a Friday. Families coming steady. Sixty-five dollars a tree, cash.

Friday Night

Hannah came out of her room and found me sitting there in the dark.

“Mom?”

I handed her the phone. I should not have, maybe. She is fifteen. But I could not make my mouth say it.

“He told them he planted them,” she said.

“I know.”

“Dad planted them. You planted them.”

“I know, honey.”

“Are you going to call him?”

I had thought about that. I had thought about getting in the car right then and driving across town to Kurt’s house and pounding on the door.

But Kurt has two kids. Katie is ten and Sam is seven. They would be home, in their pajamas, watching a movie. I was not going to stand in their front hall and call their daddy a thief.

And I had called him. Six times. He had made his choice about answering.

“No,” I said. “I’m not going to call him. I’m going to go out to the farm in the morning and sell our trees.”

Hannah sat up and looked at me. “By yourself?”

“I was hoping you and your brother might come.”

Ben was standing in the hall. I don’t know how long he had been there. He had on Erik’s old Brewers shirt that he slept in, and it hung to his knees.

“Is Uncle Kurt in trouble?” he asked.

“I don’t know yet, buddy,” I said. “I really don’t.”

That was the truth, and I think he could tell it was the truth, because he nodded and went back to bed.

Saturday Morning

I was up at five. I did not sleep much anyway.

I went to the hall closet and took Erik’s barn coat off the hook. I had not touched it since March. It was the red and black buffalo check, canvas lined, with a corduroy collar worn shiny where his neck had rubbed it.

It still smelled like him. Bar oil from the chainsaw and the orange hand soap he always used and never quite rinsed off. I stood in the hallway with my face in the collar for a few minutes before I put it on.

The sleeves came past my fingertips. The hem hung halfway to my knees. I looked like a little girl playing dress-up in her daddy’s things.

We were at the farm by seven. It was gray and cold, maybe twenty-eight degrees, with a low ceiling of cloud that looked like it was thinking about snow and had not made up its mind.

The gate was closed but not locked. Kurt had put a new padlock on it and left it hanging open. Erik’s sign was still on its chains. Thorson Family Trees. I stood and looked at that for a second, because of course it was true for Kurt too. It was his name as much as ours.

Ben opened the barn. Everything was where Erik had always kept it, but tidier. The bow saws were hanging on nails. The sleds were stacked. The baler, the one that pulls a tree through a funnel and wraps it in netting, had a fresh roll on it.