Forty Trees on the Nursing Home Lawn

The seconds stay home. Every farm has some, the lopsided ones, the trees with a bare side or a double top. Joanne always stacks them out by the road on the Saturday before Thanksgiving with a hand-lettered sign and a gray metal cash box with a slot in the lid.

That year the sign said Seconds, $10, Cash Only, in black marker on a piece of plywood. Duane’s handwriting. I’d know it anywhere from twenty years of Christmas cards.

Cole saw it first, from the school bus window on a Thursday afternoon. He came in and dropped his backpack and said, “Aunt Joanne’s got the seconds out. There’s a whole lot of them.”

Hallie was at the kitchen table doing chemistry homework. She stopped writing. She didn’t look up for a while.

Then she went to her room and came back with the envelope from her dresser.

She counted it out on the kitchen table, every bill. Twenties and tens, a few fives. Four hundred dollars. She made little stacks of forty, ten of them, lined up in a row.

“Mom,” she said. “Can you drive me over there Saturday? With the trailer?”

“What for?”

“I want to buy forty of them.”

“And do what with forty Christmas trees?”

She looked up at me, and her face was calm, and it was the first time since August that she looked like herself.

“I’ll tell you when I figure it out,” she said.

That night I told Matt, and he thought about it for a long time with the newspaper in his lap.

“Let her,” he said finally. “It’s her money. It’s the only part of this she gets to decide.”

Saturday morning was gray and cold, about twenty-eight degrees, with the kind of wind that comes across the cut fields with nothing to stop it. We hooked our flat utility trailer to the Silverado, and Hallie and I drove out County Road B.

The pile was by the road where it always was, maybe sixty trees leaned in a long row against a snow fence. The cash box sat on an overturned bucket. Nobody was around but Duane, who was down at the landing running the baler.

Hallie got out and walked along the row. She took her gloves off and touched the trees, one after another. She lifted one away from the fence and turned it in a full circle, and set it back, and took the next one.

“Mom,” she said. “Come look at this.”

I walked over. The tree she was holding was a seven-footer, full all the way around, with a straight leader standing up at the top, cut at an angle just above the bud. It was the most beautiful tree I had seen that year.

“This is a second?” I said.

“These are mine,” she said. “These are from the north block. I know these rows.”

Duane must have seen us, because he shut down the baler and walked up the lane in his insulated coveralls. He nodded to me. He looked at Hallie, and at the trailer, and at the envelope in her hand.

“You buying?” he said.

“Forty,” Hallie said. She opened the cash box and pushed the envelope through the slot, all of it, and closed the lid.

Duane stood there a moment. Then he pulled on his gloves and started helping us load. He carried them two at a time, one under each arm, his bad shoulder and all, and laid them on the trailer with their butts to the front.