The Trees I Sold From the Crossroads

“I was wrong,” he said. “I want to say it out here and not on the phone. Florene pushed, and I gave in, and I told myself you had the bank and it didn’t matter. It mattered. I knew it did. I let it happen anyhow.”

People were listening. I knew they were. I didn’t care for that. I didn’t want him standing in a church parking lot apologizing in front of half the township.

But he had chosen to, and I understood that he had chosen to.

“Thank you,” I said. “I mean that.”

“I’d like you back at the box next year,” he said. “If you’d come.”

I looked at the flatbed. At Ty with his cracked red hands and his spool of twine.

At Cassie in her gray coat with snow in her hair. At my dad in his lawn chair under the quilt, with his coffee can and his cane.

“I’ve got my own trees now, Arvid,” I said. “Dad and I are putting in two thousand seedlings this spring. I’ll be out here.”

He nodded slowly. I think he had known I would say that. I think he had come anyway.

“But the kids will still come out to the farm,” I said. “Christmas Eve, like always. That doesn’t change. You’re their grandpa.”

He had to look down at his cap for a minute. When he looked back up, his eyes were wet, and so were mine, and Cleta was very busy with her coffee cup.

“Ty,” Arvid said. “I heard you’ve been tying.”

Ty nodded. He didn’t say anything. He was twelve and he was still mad, and I didn’t make him pretend he wasn’t.

“I’d like a tree,” Arvid said to me. “For the farmhouse. Florene wanted a big one, and I don’t have a decent eight-footer left on the hill. I sold all of the good ones in the first week. Brandon didn’t know to hold any back.”

I walked down the flatbed and pulled out the best fir we had left, a straight eight-foot Fraser, thick to the ground, that Dad had planted the spring after my divorce.

I stood it up in the snow and turned it slow so he could see all the way around it.

“That one,” Arvid said.

“Forty dollars,” I said.

He paid me two twenties out of his wallet. I didn’t give him a discount, and I didn’t charge him extra.

He was a customer, like Cleta and Jubal and the young family with the little boy who clapped. He paid what everybody paid.

Ty tied it. He didn’t look at his grandpa while he did it.

He went around the butt and up the trunk in a spiral and pulled it snug, and then he doubled the hitch at the top, and pulled it, and pulled it again.

“So it rides home safe,” Ty said, to nobody in particular.

Arvid put one big hand on top of Ty’s head, just for a second, the way he used to when Ty was little. Ty let him.

Then my ex-husband’s father picked up his tree, one of three hundred my dad planted on my five acres for later, and carried it across the gravel to his truck, and laid it in the bed, and drove it home to his farmhouse for Christmas.