The Spruce Row That Was Hers

He half rose from the chair. He held out one hand across the table, and for a moment I thought he was reaching for her. Hannah looked at the hand. She did not take it, and she did not push it away. She simply stood, picked up her notebook, and said, “I have homework.”

Then she went upstairs.

Merle stood there with his hand in the air, a seventy-one-year-old man in his church shirt, in his son’s kitchen, with nothing to hold. Then he lowered it slowly and put it in his pocket.

Marlene stood too. She set the pie dish down in front of me. “Cut it for the girl,” she said quietly. “Tomorrow, when she wants it.”

“I will.”

“Good night, Colleen.”

They went out into the cold together, across the yard in the dark. Merle walked a little ahead and Marlene a little behind, and at the lane he stopped and stood looking down the line of ten blue spruce in the porch light, standing straight as fence posts. Then Marlene took his arm, and the two of them walked on toward the old house.

Mike came up behind me and put his chin on top of my head. “He’s never going to say it,” he said.

“He’ll pay it, though,” I said. “Every month, into her hand. That’s hard on him.”

“It’s supposed to be,” he said.

I went upstairs a little later and stood outside Hannah’s door. The light was on under it. I heard the scratch of her pencil, and I knocked, and she said, “Come in.”

She was sitting cross-legged on her bed with the green notebook in her lap. She had turned to a clean page near the back and ruled it into columns with a ruler. At the top she had written a new heading in her careful hand.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Ten trees,” she said. “Lane row. Starting measurements in June.” She looked up. “It’s a new page. I’m going to plant ten more in the spring, in the north row, from Ray’s seedlings, if he’ll sell them to me wholesale.”

“I think he might.”

“I’m going to tie the twine on them the first day.” She touched the blank column. “So I can see them from the road.”

“Mom, do you think Grandpa will ever tell me he’s sorry?”

I thought about it. I wanted to give her an honest answer. “I think he already did,” I said. “The only way he knows how. He signed his name.”

She was quiet. Outside, a truck rattled past on the county road, and its headlights slid across the ceiling and were gone.

She fell asleep like that, with the notebook open in her lap and her pencil still in her hand. I took it out of her fingers and turned off the light.

In the morning, early, before the school bus, I went to the window and looked down the lane at the ten of them standing in the frost. The sun was just coming up over the north field, low and white on the tips of the branches. Tree nineteen stood at the near end, a little taller than the rest. Beyond it, the county road ran empty toward the township hall.

By the time the bus came, there were two trucks parked at the end of the lane, and a man in each one, looking at the trees.