The door opened and Joanne got out. She was wearing her good wool coat, the one she wears to church. She stood next to the car and looked at Hallie, and then she looked past her at the lawn.
Hallie said something I couldn’t hear. Then she turned and walked toward the trees, and after a moment Joanne followed her.
“Go on,” Grandma said to me, without taking her eyes off the window. “Go on out. I’ll watch from here. I can see fine.”
I put my coat on and went.
By the time I got out there they were walking the first row, side by side, not talking. I stopped at the end of the row, by the outlet, and stood there with my hands in my pockets. Neither one of them told me to go away.
Joanne stopped at the third tree. She took her glove off and reached in past the lights and took hold of the trunk. She turned it a little on its wire, so she could see all the way around it. Then she reached up and touched the leader with two fingers.
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She went to the next tree and did the same thing. And the next one. All the way down the row, eight trees, turning each one, touching each leader. Then she went to the second row and started again.
I watched her face. I have known Joanne for twenty years, and I have seen her at weddings and funerals and every Christmas Eve, and I have never seen her face do what it did in that second row.
She stopped at a seven-footer in the middle of the third row. It was the one Hallie had held up by the fence and turned for me. Joanne stood in front of it with her bare hand on the trunk for a long time.
“These are number ones,” she said. She said it to the tree. “Every one of these is a number one.”
“I know,” Hallie said.
“These are off the north block.” Joanne turned and looked at her. “I told Duane to pull them for the stand in town. The best block on the place. I know these trees.”
“I sheared that block first,” Hallie said. “On the Fourth of July. You stood next to me.”
Joanne didn’t say anything for a while. The wind came across the lawn and moved the tops of the trees, and the lights shivered in them.
“Hallie,” she said finally. “I’m going to tell you what I did, and I’m not going to dress it up.”
Hallie waited.
“There was nothing wrong with your leaders. I knew it when I wrote out that envelope. I knew it when I walked your dad down that row and showed him two trees I’d picked out ahead of time.”
She took a breath. I could see it go out of her white in the cold.
“My buyer in Milwaukee called me the last week of July and cut his price four dollars a tree. Four dollars, on three thousand trees. And I’d just bought the new baler in the spring, on payments, because the old one finally quit. I sat at the kitchen table with a pencil and I couldn’t make it work.”
“So you didn’t pay me,” Hallie said. Not angry. Just saying it so it was said.
“So I didn’t pay you.” Joanne nodded. “I told myself a kid wouldn’t know the difference. That’s the truth. I told myself a kid wouldn’t know a short leader from a good one, and your dad wouldn’t fight his own aunt, and it would all blow over by Christmas.”