Forty Trees on the Nursing Home Lawn

He was gone almost two hours. When he came home he sat at the kitchen table, and I poured him a cup of coffee he didn’t drink.

“She walked me down one row,” he said. “The east end of the north block. She pointed at two trees with short leaders and said, see, Matt. That’s what I’m talking about.”

“Two trees,” I said.

“Two trees out of four thousand.” He turned the cup around on the table. “I asked her to walk the rest with me. She said she didn’t have time. She said a deal’s a deal at my grading.”

“What did you say?”

“I said Hallie cut them the way you showed her. She said then I guess she didn’t listen.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “Jenna, I’ve known that woman my whole life. I didn’t know what to say to her.”

I know what some people would say. Take her to small claims. It is two thousand six hundred dollars, a handshake in front of witnesses, a sixteen-year-old with a tally on a calendar. Any judge in Langlade County would side with the kid.

But you have to understand who Joanne is to us.

When Matt’s dad had his heart attack six years ago, it was Joanne who drove to the hospital in Wausau at two in the morning and sat in the hard chair next to Matt until the end. Matt was thirty-nine and he fell apart, and Joanne held his hand and didn’t let go.

And there is Grandma Irene. She is ninety-one and her mind comes and goes now. Some days she thinks Matt is his father. Some days she asks for Walt. But every Sunday, when we come in after church, the first thing she asks is whether the family is getting along.

“Is everybody talking?” she says. “Are you all talking to each other?”

You don’t take your husband’s aunt to court over two thousand six hundred dollars with Grandma lying in that bed, asking that. You just don’t. Matt and I talked about it for a week, and we both came out at the same place.

So we let it sit.

Hallie let it sit too, in her way. She didn’t talk about the trees anymore. She took the calendar off her bedroom door and put it in a drawer. She put the four hundred dollars in an envelope in her dresser and didn’t spend any of it.

I hated that more than I hated the money.

Joanne kept coming to Maple Ridge every Sunday at two. We came at one, after church and lunch. Most Sundays we overlapped by about fifteen minutes, and those fifteen minutes were polite, in the way that hurts more than shouting.

“Hallie,” Joanne would say, nodding.

“Aunt Joanne,” Hallie would say, nodding back.

And Grandma would look from one to the other with her pale blue eyes, and you could see her trying to work out what was wrong, and not finding it.

In October the leaves came down and the first hard frost came in. In November the cutting started at the farm. You could hear the chainsaws from our road on a still morning, and the big flatbeds went by our place headed south toward Highway 45, stacked high with netted trees.

The wholesale load goes first. Every tree is cut, dragged to the landing, shaken, and pushed through the baler, which wraps it in plastic netting so it comes out a tight green tube you can stack like cordwood. Then it goes on the truck to the buyer in Milwaukee.