Chapter 1: The Saplings
The second Saturday of April arrived the way Dan Whitaker believed all good things should: quietly, and with coffee. He stood at the kitchen window of 14 Foxglove Lane in his oldest flannel shirt, watching the light come up over the side yard, where six trees waited in their nursery pots along the fence line. Four flowering dogwoods, one redbud, one serviceberry. He had been planning that row since November, sketching it on graph paper while other men his age planned golf trips.
"You're doing the thing," Priya said, coming up behind him with her own mug. "The general surveying his troops."
"They're not troops," Dan said. "They're an investment in shade. In twenty years, that side of the house will be the coolest room in Willow Bend."
"In twenty years Lily will be thirty-two and you'll be explaining root flare to her children."
"That's the dream," he said, and meant it.
Lily appeared in the doorway in pajamas and one sock, took in the pots through the window, and announced that she had been thinking about names. Lily had named the vacuum cleaner (Gerald), the Whitakers' elderly Subaru (Mrs. Pruitt), and a houseplant that had predeceased its name by several months. Dan, who taught seventh-grade science and knew better than to stand between his daughter and a taxonomy, got out a pencil.
They ate pancakes standing up, and by eight o'clock the three of them were outside with shovels, a wheelbarrow of compost, two buckets, and the garden hose uncoiled like a green snake across the grass. The morning was cool and bright, the mountains west of Asheville still wearing a thin blue haze, and the whole street smelled faintly of somebody else's lilacs.
Dan dug the first hole himself, narrating out of habit. "Twice as wide as the pot, no deeper than the root ball. The worst thing you can do to a young tree is bury it like a fence post. See this flare, where the trunk widens at the bottom? That has to stay above the soil line, or the bark stays wet and the tree strangles in its own bed."
"Death by blanket," Lily said gravely, writing in the little notebook she'd brought. "Noted."
They soaked each root ball in a bucket before planting, teased the roots loose with their fingers, set the trees in, and backfilled in stages, watering as they went so the soil settled without air pockets. Dan checked each trunk with a level, not because the trees cared about vertical, but because he did. Priya worked the compost with the competence of a woman who started IVs on squirming toddlers for a living and considered a shovel a rest cure.
The dogwoods went in first, spaced down the side lot where the afternoon sun had baked the grass to straw every August since they'd moved in. Lily named them in order: Captain, Biscuit, Professor, and Dot. The redbud β already showing its magenta buds along bare branches, like it had dressed up early for its own party β became Ruby, which Dan conceded was less a name than a description, and Lily conceded nothing at all. The little serviceberry she claimed outright. "This one's mine," she said. "It makes berries in June. I'm going to make a pie, and when people ask, I'm going to say the tree and I collaborated."
"It'll have to fight the birds for them," Dan said. "Serviceberries are a cafeteria. Cedar waxwings will strip it in a weekend."
"Then the birds can collaborate too."
By eleven, neighbors had begun to drift past in the procession of a Saturday β dog walkers, a pair of joggers, the couple from two doors down who stopped to admire the redbud and stayed to offer opinions about mulch. Dan listened to all of it with the patience of a man who had waited three springs for this row. He mulched each tree in a wide, flat ring, keeping the chips pulled back from the trunk β "donuts, not volcanoes," he told Lily, who wrote that down too β and set the soaker hose in a slow spiral.
At noon they stood in the yard eating sandwiches off paper plates, looking at six thin trunks in a line, each one staked loosely, each one, to anyone else, unimpressive. To Dan they looked like the first sentence of a long letter the yard would spend decades writing: shade for the west windows, blossoms in April, berries in June, red leaves in October, and a row of white flowers every spring between his house and the Kesslers' fence.
"Take the picture," Priya said, because she knew him.
So Dan wiped his hands on his jeans, walked to the end of the row, and photographed it β six saplings, three shovels, one daughter holding her notebook up like a realtor with a brand-new sold sign. He stood there a moment longer than the photograph required, dirt still under his fingernails, entirely and unreasonably proud.