The Trees I Sold From the Crossroads

Ty’s hands

The second Saturday, it was nine degrees at noon. The sky was hard blue and the snow squeaked, and we sold fifty-one trees anyway, because people in northern Michigan do not stay home for nine degrees.

Ty tied every one. He would not wear his good leather gloves to do it, because he said he couldn’t feel the knot through them.

By two o’clock his hands were red and cracked across the knuckles.

I told him to sit in the truck. He wouldn’t. I told him Cassie could tie for a while.

He said Cassie tied them too loose, which was not true, and Cassie let him say it, which was kind of her.

About three, I looked over and Dad had Ty standing in front of his lawn chair.

He had taken both of Ty’s hands in his own big old hands and was holding them under the quilt, against his chest, to warm them.

Neither of them said anything. Dad just held his grandson’s hands. Ty stood there, twelve years old and nearly as tall as me, and let him.

After a while Ty said, very quietly, so I almost didn’t hear it over the road, “Grandpa. You planted these for Mom. Didn’t you. When she was sad.”

Dad didn’t answer right away. He looked out at the flatbed, at the trees, at the snow on them in the sun.

“I planted them for later,” Dad said. “I didn’t know what later was going to be. Turns out it was you, tying them up.”

I had to turn around and pretend to straighten the trees on the flatbed for a while after that.

Leora came over with a cup of coffee and stood next to me and didn’t say anything, and I was grateful.

Half

By the end of the second weekend, we had sold two hundred and twenty trees.

Dad’s coffee can had to be emptied into a bank bag twice, and I took it to my own bank on Monday and deposited it at my own window, which made the other girls laugh.

I did the arithmetic one night at the kitchen table after supper. I didn’t mean to. I am a teller. I can’t help it.

Of the regulars I could remember from Arvid’s farm, the ones I had rung up year after year, I counted forty-six families who had come to the crossroads instead.

I knew of about fifty who still went to the farm.

Half. Half his regulars had driven the extra mile past his sign to buy a tree off a borrowed flatbed in a church parking lot, from the woman he had let go.

I didn’t want that. I want that to be plain. I never asked one of them to come. But I would be lying if I said it didn’t mean something to me, that they came.

Cassie found me at the table with the numbers. She read them over my shoulder.

“Mom,” she said. “That’s a lot of people who like you.”

“It’s a lot of people who like your grandpa’s trees,” I said.

“No,” Cassie said. “It’s people who like you.” She put her arms around my neck from behind, the way she hadn’t done since she was eleven. Then she went to bed.