Eighty-Two
My grandfather planted the pines in rows of nine. He was very particular about that. Nine across, nine deep, eighty-one trees on the north slope behind the house, and every autumn he walked the rows with a notebook and counted them.
“Why do you count them?” I asked him once. I was seven. “They can’t go anywhere.”
He looked at me for a long time, the way adults do when they are deciding how much of the world you can carry. Then he wrote 81 in the notebook, closed it, and said, “Good. Then it’ll always be eighty-one.”
He died in March. I came back to the house in October to settle the estate, and on my first night there, because I couldn’t sleep and because it seemed like the kind of thing you do for the dead, I took his notebook up the north slope and counted the trees.
I counted eighty-two.
What the Pines Keep
A woman comes home to settle her grandfather’s estate and finds that his pine forest has one more tree than it should.
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I read all three chapters in bed and then had to get up and close the curtains.
Eighty-two. EIGHTY-TWO.