The Spruce Row That Was Hers

She had counted the money out the night before, in ones and fives: babysitting and birthday money, exactly what she had left after the camp fee. Sixty dollars for one tree, she said, plus four for tax.

“I don’t think there’s tax on that,” I told her.

“Then he can keep the change.”

Kowalski Landscape and Nursery sat at the edge of town behind a wide gravel lot, with a tin-roofed shop, a row of dump trucks, and a skid steer with its bucket down. Behind it the yard ran long and flat, row after row of trees in wire baskets and burlap, standing in the cold morning light like a crowd waiting for something to begin.

The blue spruce were at the far end. I saw the yellow twine before she did. Then she did.

She stopped walking. She did not run. She stood on the gravel and looked down the long row of trees, thirty of them standing in a block with their root balls wrapped tight, and every one had a yellow loop tied on its third branch. She did not make a sound. She counted them under her breath, her lips moving, one finger lifting a little at her side.

“Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty,” she said. “They’re all here.”

“Good,” I said. My voice was not quite my own.

A man in a canvas coat came out of the shop with a coffee in one hand and a clipboard in the other. He was fifty-five or so, with a gray beard cut close and a plain ball cap, and he walked the way men walk who spend their lives on gravel. He slowed when he saw the two of us standing at the edge of his spruce block.

“Help you ladies?”

“Mr. Kowalski?” Hannah said.

“That’s me.”

“My name is Hannah Whitaker.” Her voice was steady. I have never been prouder of anything in my life. “Those are my trees. My grandpa sold them to you Friday.”

His face changed. It did not harden. It went slack, as though someone had let the air out of him, and he looked from her to the trees, and from the trees to the twine, and from the twine to me.

“Merle Whitaker told me they were his.”

“They were on his land,” Hannah said. “But I planted them. I was eight. I watered them every summer and I measured them every June. I’ve got it in a notebook.” She held it up in both hands. “He didn’t know I’d mind. I’d like to buy one back.”

“One,” Ray said.

“For my grandma’s yard. Her old spruce came down in the windstorm in August. She wanted one of mine for the spot.”

She held out the envelope. She had sealed it herself and written the amount on the front in pencil. Ray did not take it. He looked at the envelope, and then at the yellow twine on the nearest tree, and then at me. I kept my face still and did not say a word. This was her turn.

He set his coffee on a fence post. “Walk with me,” he said.

We went down the row together, the three of us, our boots crunching on the gravel. Ray walked slowly with his hands in his coat pockets, and he stopped at the first spruce and put one hand on a branch the way you touch a horse.