The Row With His Name On It

Setting Up

Ben went straight to the shaker. That is the machine that spins a cut tree on a post and shakes out the dead needles and any bird nests, so you do not bring them home on your living room carpet.

Erik had let Ben run it the last two years, with supervision. Ben checked the belt and checked the plug and pulled the cord, and it started on the second try, and he looked over at me with his father’s exact face.

Hannah and I carried the card table out of the barn and set it up by the door. I put the cash box on it. It was the same gray box Erik had bought at Fleet Farm the first year, with the little tray inside for ones and fives.

It was empty. Of course it was.

I opened my wallet and put in two hundred dollars of my own money for change. Twenties, tens, fives. Hannah watched me do it and did not ask.

Then I set the stool by the table and sat down and laid Erik’s bow saw across my lap. I don’t know why. It was the saw he always carried when he walked the rows with customers, pointing out which trees were full on all four sides.

Hannah got out her phone. “Mom. Look up.”

I looked at her.

“Dad would want a picture,” she said. “Of you. Out here. On opening day.”

So she took it. Me on the stool in his coat, with the saw across my knees and the cash box at my elbow and the barn behind me. I did not smile in it. I did not know how to, yet.

The Larsons

The first car came up the lane at five after eight. It was a little blue hatchback with Iowa plates and a ski rack on top with no skis on it.

A young couple got out. They could not have been more than twenty-five. He was tall and thin with a beard he was still working on, and she had a red stocking cap pulled down over her ears and a smile that took up half her face.

“Are you open?” she called. “We weren’t sure, it’s so early.”

“We’re open,” I said.

She came right up to the table. Her name was Megan Larson and his was Tyler. She told Hannah they had been married in June and moved up from Ames for his job at the clinic in Marshfield.

“This is our first Christmas in our own place,” she said. “It’s only an apartment, but it has high ceilings. We want a big one.”

Hannah gave them a saw and a sled and a yellow tag. Ben explained, very seriously, how to cut low and straight so the stump would not be a trip hazard for the next person. Tyler listened as if Ben were a professor.

They went off down the mowed path into row twelve. For a long time I could hear them laughing out there in the trees, arguing about which one, the way young couples do.