“Mom! Mr. Alex! The apples are already red! Look!”
Kate set down her mug and stood. Alex put down the screwdriver. They walked across the yard together to the apple tree, where Lily was standing on tiptoe reaching for a branch with a red apple just out of reach. Alex stepped up and bent the branch down. Lily picked the apple, bit into it immediately without wiping it off, and announced through a full mouth:
“Good!”
“Don’t talk with food in your mouth,” Kate said.
“Okay.” Lily chewed. “Good,” she repeated properly. “This was your mom’s tree, right?”
“Right,” Alex said.
Lily looked at the apple tree seriously.
“Then she’s sharing with us,” the little girl concluded. “That’s nice.”
He didn’t answer. Just looked at the tree—old, crooked, dark-barked, heavy with fruit. His mother had planted it long before he was born. It remembered everything: his childhood, her old age, the empty year, this summer. Kate stood beside him, shoulder to shoulder, looking at it too.
Then he went back to the gate and tightened the hinge the rest of the way. Quietly, without hurry, the way a person does something that should have been done long ago. And for the first time in a very long while, he didn’t feel alone.
