The Tulips Along Pine Ridge Road

I turned. It was Colleen.

She came down the porch steps in her good gray wool coat, the church one, buttoned to the neck, with her hair done and her glasses on. She was carrying a cardboard box in both arms, a big brown box with a flap folded over the top and the corners soft with handling.

She walked with her head up, steady, and her shoes sank into the soft grass at the edge of the road. Her mouth was set in a line, but her chin was not quite steady.

Eighty people stopped digging.

She did not look at me. She did not look at my father. She walked straight down the line of kneeling neighbors, past Elroy, past the Future Farmers, past the old man in the Packers cap holding a bucket, until she reached the mailbox.

And she stopped in front of Lily.

Lily looked up at her with a dirt smear on her cheek and a bulb in her fist. She did not say anything. Neither did Colleen. The wind snapped at the edge of the tarp over the cocoa.

“I brought some,” Colleen said at last. Her voice was dry and quiet. “Two hundred. Red ones. The same kind that were at the mailbox. I drove to the greenhouse in Viroqua Friday afternoon and had them order them in.” She cleared her throat. “It was ninety-four dollars.”

She set the box down in the dirt. She did it carefully, the way you put down something breakable. Then she looked at the long line of people, and I saw that she was not going to say any of what she had practiced in the car.

“I mowed them,” she said, loud enough for the row to hear. “I did it on purpose, and I knew it would kill them. They were not messy. I was.”

Nobody moved. I heard a truck door close somewhere up the road.

“Lily,” Colleen said. “I would like to put them back. If you would show me how. I do not know where your grandmother wanted them.”

There was a pause as long as a breath. Tessa looked at me. Gabe looked at me. I did not help her. It was not mine to do. It was Lily’s.

Lily considered it with her whole face. She wiped her nose on the back of her glove. She held out the trowel, the little one with the green handle that was too small for any adult hand.

“You need the pointy end up,” she said. “And you can’t plant them right where mine are. Mine are the red ones.”

“Where should I plant them?”

Lily frowned at the long strip of upturned earth. She looked at Gabe, and Gabe looked down at the clipboard, at the blank space at the very end of his grandmother’s drawing, past the culvert, where the last rows had never been filled in.

“At the end,” Gabe said. “She left room.”

Colleen took the trowel.

I want to tell you what she did then, because I have thought about it since. She was wearing her good wool coat and her church shoes, and she got down on her knees in a county road ditch in thirty-four degrees with eighty people watching.