The Row With His Name On It

Kurt

Then the Silverado came around the windbreak, and you know the rest of that part.

He stopped in the lane. Sixty yards out. Engine running.

I want to be honest about what was in me while he sat there. It was not just anger. It was the thing under the anger, which is a kind of tired so deep you cannot see the bottom of it.

This was the man who dug half those holes in 2009. He stood up at our wedding. He carried one corner of Erik’s casket down the aisle of St. John’s, and I watched his shoulders shake the whole way.

Ben came over from the shaker and stood next to me. Not in front of me. Next to me. His shoulder against my arm through the canvas of his father’s coat.

Hannah did not move. She stood on my other side with the roll of tags in her hand like it was something she might throw.

Finally the engine shut off. The quiet after it was so big I could hear the wind in the firs.

Kurt got out. He had on his brown Carhartt jacket and a blaze orange cap from deer season. He walked up the lane slow, with his hands in his pockets, and he did not look at the kids.

He stopped about ten feet from the table.

“Nic,” he said.

That was all. Just my name. The way he had said it ten thousand times.

I opened my mouth to answer him. I don’t know what I would have said. I had rehearsed it all night and every word was gone.

And then the Larsons came out of row twelve.

Who Do We Pay

They were dragging a seven-foot Fraser on the sled behind them, both of them pulling on the rope, red-cheeked and out of breath and grinning like they had won something.

“We found it!” Megan called. “Tyler wanted the one with the bald spot but I said no.”

“It wasn’t a bald spot,” Tyler said. “It had character.”

They hauled it right up to the barn and stood there catching their breath. Then they looked at me, at the card table with the cash box. And then they looked at Kurt.

I watched Tyler’s face. I saw him place Kurt.

“Hey,” Tyler said, friendly. “You’re the guy. Our friends Dan and Kelsey came out last weekend. They said you planted all these yourself.”

Kurt did not say anything.

Tyler pulled off one glove with his teeth and dug his wallet out of his back pocket. He looked from Kurt to me and back again, a little confused, the way you are when you walk into a room and feel the air is wrong but cannot say why.

“First tree we ever cut together,” he said. “So which one of you do we pay?”

Nobody answered him.

Kurt looked at the cash box. Then he looked at the coat. His brother’s coat, with the corduroy collar worn shiny, on a woman it did not fit.

I could have stood up and said it was my farm. Every word would have been true. But I did not say anything. I just sat there with the saw across my lap and waited. I wanted to know what Kurt would do. I think I needed to know it more than I needed the sixty-five dollars.

Then Kurt took his right hand out of his pocket and pointed at me.

“Her,” he said. His voice cracked on it. He cleared his throat and tried again. “You pay her. It’s her farm. Hers and my brother’s. They planted every one of these.”

Megan looked at him, and then at me, and something went across her face. She was young, but she was not slow.

“Oh,” she said softly.

Tyler counted out three twenties and a five and set them on the table in front of me. “Thank you,” he said. “It’s a beautiful tree.”

“It is,” I said. “My husband would have liked the one with character better, though.”

Megan laughed, and it broke something in the air, and Kurt let out a breath like he had been holding it since March.