The Spruce Row That Was Hers

Merle gave a short laugh, not unkind. “For what? They’re sold, Colleen. He’s got a business to run.”

“Then he’ll say no, and she’ll have asked.”

I turned and walked back toward my daughter. Behind me I heard the old chair creak, and then nothing.

I could have called Merle a thief that afternoon. I could have called Ray Kowalski’s shop and gotten a polite no from a stranger, which is the easiest thing in the world to give somebody over a phone. Hannah did not want a phone call. She wanted to look the man in the face.

Marlene came up from her own place down the lane that night. She is Merle’s wife of forty-eight years, a small woman in a cardigan who has been kind to me since the first week I met her.

“I didn’t know,” she said at our kitchen table. “Colleen, I swear to you. He didn’t say a word to me until it was done.”

She sat down across from Hannah, and for a moment neither of them spoke. Then Marlene reached out and turned the green notebook around so she could read it.

“Tree nineteen,” she said, tracing a column of numbers. “Fifty-eight inches.”

“That one was the best,” Hannah said. “It grew sixteen inches last year.”

“Is that your star?”

“That’s the biggest star.”

Marlene laughed once, a wet sound, and put her hand flat on the page. Her own old spruce, the one Merle had planted the spring they were married, had come down in the August windstorm and taken a corner of her porch roof with it. It had stood by her kitchen window for forty-eight years. The spot was bare now, a stump and a scar in the lawn.

“I always wanted one of yours in that spot,” she told Hannah. “I mentioned it to you, remember? Last spring.”

“I remember.”

“I never thought you’d have to buy it back.”

Hannah studied her grandmother’s face. I watched my daughter make a decision. It was a quiet one, the kind you can only see on the face of a person who is already past arguing.

“I’m going to ask for one,” she said. “Just one. For you.”

“Honey, that isn’t how it works.”

“I know. I’m going to ask anyway.”

Mike called a little after nine from a motel lot in North Carolina, where his lineman crew had been setting poles for nine days after a storm. I told him all of it. “I’ll call Dad,” he said.

“Don’t,” I said. “Let her ask the man herself. If you call your father tonight it turns into a fight between two men over a check, and it stops being about her.”

“I’d have written that check standing in the barn,” he said, and his voice cracked. “I’m two states away. I’m no use to her.”

“You’re home Wednesday,” I said. “Sit at the kitchen table when I tell you to, and don’t say anything until I do.”

I called the school office at seven in the morning and told the secretary Hannah would be in after lunch. I called the insurance office in Stanton, where I keep the books, and told them I had a family matter. Then I put my daughter in the Ford at eight-thirty, with her notebook on her lap and sixty-four dollars in an envelope, and we drove twenty-two miles to Greenville.