The Tree Lot the Landlord Evicted

“Miss Dot,” I said. “You don’t have to sit out here.”

“I’m on the Chain,” she said. “I got my call at five after eight last night. Helen said the lot had been evicted and the church needed trucks. I have no truck. I do have a chair.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And I can add and subtract. Somebody ought to be at the gate.”

She would not move. She sat there until dark. I put a thermos at her feet and a blanket on her knees and I did not ask her again.

In the whole long, cold, bright day I did not think anything of Miss Dot. She was one name of forty-one, an old woman in a lawn chair taking dollars, and I had a field to run. I would think about her a great deal later.

By two o’clock we had sold two hundred and sixty trees. By three, three hundred and seventy. By a quarter to four there were two trees left standing in the whole field: a crooked Scotch pine with a missing branch that nobody had wanted all day, and one tall, perfect Fraser, seven feet, that I had been holding at the end of the middle row since the first load, because I had told myself I was saving it for somebody.

I wasn’t saving it for a customer.

Every year, in the last hour of the last day, the man who runs the lot picks the best tree left and takes it to the family. It isn’t in any bylaw. It is just what we have always done.

I found Tasha folding up a clipboard beside her sister’s minivan. “I need the pick of the lot,” I said. “Not the one I’d pick. The one the youngest picks.”

So that was how Pipp, at four years old, in a church-closet coat two sizes too big, with a rubber band of soft orange tags in his fist, walked down three rows of Scotch pines in the low yellow light, holding his father’s finger, and stopped in front of the seven-footer I’d been hiding all day.

“That one,” he said.

“Why that one?” Marcus asked.

“It’s got a hole for the star.”

And he was right. At the very top of that tree, between two tight bright branches, was a clean little gap where a star could sit.

Before Marcus carried it anywhere, he walked to the cash table and put two twenties in Miss Dot’s green box. “We pay like everybody,” he said. She took the bills without a word and wrote it in the book. That was tree number three hundred and ninety-nine.

That was when we heard a truck come off Route 9 onto the gravel lane. It came slowly, a pickup with a canvas top. It parked at the far end of the row, next to the flagpole, a good distance from Miss Dot’s lawn chair, and the driver’s door stayed shut for a long time.

I knew the truck before I saw the man.

When Walt got out, he was not wearing his good coat. He was in a gray work jacket, unzipped, and he had his hat in his hands, and he was staring at the field. I watched his eyes go over all of it: the pickups, the hot-chocolate table, the women in their blankets, the schoolchildren, the empty rows where four hundred trees had stood that morning.