Forty Trees on the Nursing Home Lawn

She looked down the rows, at forty trees lit up in the gray afternoon.

“I was wrong about all of it,” she said. “Except your dad. He didn’t fight me. You did.”

Joanne put her glove back on. She looked up at the building, at the window on the east end, where a small white-haired shape sat very still behind the glass.

“She’s been watching this whole time, hasn’t she,” Joanne said.

“Since lunch,” Hallie said.

Joanne closed her eyes for a second. Then she opened them.

“Well,” she said. “Let’s go in.”

Joanne stood in the doorway of Grandma’s room in her good coat.

“Hi, Mom,” she said.

Grandma looked at her for a long time. Then she looked at Hallie. Then she looked back out the window at the lawn.

“I could always tell a Fraser,” she said. “Your father taught me, the first year. You can tell by the needles, how they turn up silver underneath. You can tell by the smell.”

“I know, Mom.”

“And I could always tell when you were lying about one, Joanie.” Grandma’s voice was very calm. “Since you were nine years old and told your father the deer got into the seedlings.”

Joanne made a sound that was half a laugh and half something else. She put her hand over her mouth.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” she said.

“Don’t tell me,” Grandma said. She tipped her head toward Hallie. “Tell her.”

Joanne turned to Hallie. She had to swallow a couple of times before she could.

“I’m sorry, Hallie,” she said. “You did good work. You did better work than anybody I’ve had out there in ten years. And I cheated you for it.”

Hallie nodded. Her eyes were full but she didn’t let them go.

“Okay,” she said.

That was all she said. Okay. And I watched my daughter stand there and decide something, right in front of me, and I was prouder of her in that minute than I have ever been of anything.

Then Grandma said, “Hallie. Bring me a piece of one.”

“A piece, Grandma?”

“A branch. Off the north block.” She held out both of her hands, thin as paper, palms up, in her lap. “I haven’t held one in a long time.”

Hallie looked at me. I looked at Pam, who had come to stand in the doorway, and Pam nodded.

Hallie went out alone. I watched her through the window walk down the third row to the seven-footer in the middle, the one Joanne had stood in front of. She took her pocketknife out and cut one low branch, a little one, about a foot long, from the back where it wouldn’t show.

She brought it back in and laid it across Grandma’s hands.

Grandma Irene held it. She didn’t say anything at first. She turned it over so she could see the silver undersides of the needles. Then she lifted it up to her face, slow, and closed her eyes, and breathed in.

“There he is,” she said.

None of us asked who she meant. We all knew.

She sat there holding that branch against her face with her eyes closed, breathing in the smell of a tree her husband had planted sixty-five years ago, sheared by a great-granddaughter he never met. Joanne turned around and faced the wall. I heard Pam in the doorway blow her nose.

By the end of that week, word had gotten around.