My father left my brother all 310 acres of the orchard I’d pruned for twenty-six years, and he left me a 1989 flatbed with a cracked windshield, worth maybe $900. My brother leaned across the lawyer’s table and said, “Guess Dad knew which of us had a future.” Five months later he was in my driveway with his cap in his hands.
She read Marlon’s share first, and it took her most of a page.
The house. The packing shed. The bins, the two tractors, the sprayer, the water rights.
EVERY tree.
Then Lorna turned one sheet over and read mine.
“To my daughter Tricia, the 1989 Ford flatbed, with its keys and title.”
She set the paper down.
I waited for the rest.
There wasn’t any.
Lorna had done Dad’s taxes since I was in braces, and she kept a dish of butterscotch candies on her desk in yellow cellophane. I counted them because I couldn’t look at anybody. Fourteen.
Marlon was fifty-eight. He sold mortgages in Seattle and drove over twice a year, at Christmas and for the Fourth, and both times he walked the rows in loafers taking pictures for his wife.
I was fifty-three.
I’d pruned those trees every February since I was twenty-seven. I’d stood out in the frost at three in the morning running the wind machines while Dad slept. I’d fought the packing house over every cent a box.
Dad never said thank you once.
I always figured the orchard was the thank you.
Deepak was waiting in the car. He took one look at me and left the key where it was.
“Tell me he gave you the house at least,” he said.
“He gave me the flatbed.”
“The FLATBED?”
“With the keys,” I said. “Lorna made a point of the keys.”
He wanted to call a lawyer from Spokane that afternoon.
I said no.
“Trish, you gave that man TWENTY-SIX YEARS.”
“And he gave them to Marlon,” I said. “I’m not hauling Dad into a courtroom nineteen days after we buried him.”
Deepak didn’t argue.
He just reached over and turned the heat up, which is how he argues.
I drove the flatbed home the next morning. Six miles at forty, because the front end shimmies past that.
Dad’s thermos rolled around the floor the whole way. His reading glasses were folded on the dash.
I left them there.
By March I had a job on the sorting line at the same packing house I used to fight with. Nineteen-fifty an hour. Eight hours on a rubber mat, pulling bruised Galas off a belt that used to carry ours.
Marlon never called.
In April I quit sleeping. Bloom was coming, and Dad always said the week of bloom is the whole year.
“Call him,” Deepak said.
“He knows where I live.”
“So do you. That’s not the point.”
I didn’t call.
Marlon hired a crew out of the valley. Cheapest bid. They sprayed right in the middle of bloom on a warm afternoon, with the bees still working the blossoms.
I drove past on my way to the line and smelled it through the vents.
I should have turned in.
I kept driving.
By July half the trees looked tired. What fruit had set was small and crowded together, because nobody thinned it. The packing house dropped his contract on a Tuesday, and I heard about it on the line before he did.
That Friday, Verna Hansen stopped me at the mailboxes.
Verna is eighty-four. Her ground runs along Dad’s north side, and the two of them fought over that fence line for forty years like it was a sport.
She didn’t bother with hello.
“Have you looked UNDER THE SEAT of that truck?”
I laughed. “Verna, it’s a flatbed.”
“Your father sat at MY kitchen table in March,” she said. “He signed something. I signed under him. So did a notary from the bank.”
I quit laughing.
“He said it was going in the truck,” she said. “He said you’d be the only one who ever cleaned it out.”
“Why didn’t you tell me in January?”
“Because he told me to wait until your brother ran that place into the ground.”
She looked across the road at the orchard.
“I’d say I waited long enough.”
I went straight to the shed.
The bench seat on those old trucks lifts if you pull the lever and lean on it. In twenty-six years I’d never had a reason to.
Under it were jumper cables, his gloves gone stiff in the shape of his hands, and a bank envelope folded in half with a rubber band around it.
Three pages.
I could feel the bump of a notary seal through the paper.
I had my thumb under the rubber band when tires hit the gravel.
It was Dad’s silver pickup.
For one second I thought it was him.
Then Marlon got out.
His shoes were caked to the laces. He stood by the fender a long time before he came over, and when he did he took his cap off and held it in both hands.
I’d never seen my brother take his cap off for anybody.
“Trish,” he said.
I slid the envelope into my back pocket.
He looked past me at the flatbed. At the seat, tipped up. At the cables on the floor.
The color went out of his face.
“I need to ask you something,” he said. “And I need you not to lie to me.”
I waited.
“Did Dad leave ANYTHING in that truck?”
The back pocket
“Yes,” I said.
That was all I gave him. The envelope stayed where it was. I could feel the rubber band through my jeans, and the corner of it poking me every time I shifted my weight.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. You pulled in before I got the band off.”
He turned the cap around once in his hands, all the way, the way you turn a steering wheel.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll give you ten thousand dollars for the truck. Tonight. As is. Whatever’s in it, it goes with the truck, and you never have to drive that thing again.”
“It’s a nine-hundred-dollar truck, Marlon.”
“I know what it is.”
“You told me at Lorna’s it was a joke.”
“I’m not joking now.”
He wasn’t. He had the look he used to get when he was eleven and he’d broken something in the house and was trying to get to it before Dad did.
“Then how’d you know to ask what’s in it?” I said.
He didn’t answer that.
He reached inside his coat and took out a folded piece of paper. Pale green, ruled, torn along one edge where it had come out of a spiral.
I didn’t need him to unfold it.
It was a page out of Dad’s check register.
The green register
Dad bought the same green duplicate registers from the bank for forty years. He kept the current one in his shirt pocket with a pencil shoved down the spiral, and every cent that left the orchard went in it. Bins, fourteen dollars apiece. Diesel. The vet for a dog we had in 1991 named Buck. Sometimes he wrote the weather beside a check, if the weather was the reason.
My name was in there once a month for twenty-six years.
“Trish, gas, $400.”
That was my wage. It went in on the first, under the bins and above the power bill, and he never wrote anything next to it.
The Christmas before last, Marlon drove over by himself. His wife Nia stayed in Seattle with a cold, he said. After dinner he and Dad went out to the shed and got in the flatbed and sat there with the engine running.
From the kitchen window you could see the exhaust going up white past the light over the shed door.
They were out there an hour and ten minutes. I know because the pie was out of the oven and cooling the whole time.
“What are they doing?” Deepak said.
“Marlon wants money,” I said. “Marlon always wants money.”
When Dad came back in he didn’t eat his pie. He sat at his desk with his reading glasses on and wrote in the register for a long time, longer than a check takes.
In January, Marlon drove over on a Wednesday. He never came on a weekday. He took Dad into town, and when they got back Dad said it was about his taxes.
I believed that. I had no reason not to.
At the funeral Marlon paid for the casket spray and put his hand on my shoulder at the graveside and said, “Whatever you need, Trish. I mean that.” People told me afterward how good it was of him to come.
Now he held the register page out to me on my own gravel, and I read it in Dad’s pencil.
“Mar 14. Notary, bank, $10.00. At Verna’s. For Trish. In the truck, under seat.”
That was the whole line. No weather beside it.
“I found it in his desk Sunday,” Marlon said. “He wrote everything down. You know he did.”
He put the page back in his coat.
“Ten thousand, Trish. Before you open it.”
Lorna’s kitchen phone
I told him no.
He tried twelve thousand. Then he tried fifteen, which I don’t think he had. Then he said, “Then promise me you won’t open it till you talk to me first,” and I didn’t promise him anything, and he got back in Dad’s pickup and sat in it a while with the door open.
He drove off without shutting the gate.
Deepak had been on the porch the whole time. He came down the steps in his socks.
“Fifteen thousand,” he said. “For that truck.”
“I heard.”
“Open it.”
“No.”
“Trish. He knows what’s in it. You’re the only person in this whole thing who doesn’t.”
He was right, and I still couldn’t do it. Dad had folded that envelope in half and put a band on it and lifted that seat himself, at eighty-one, with his bad shoulder. Tearing it open in the driveway felt like going through his pockets at the funeral home.
I went inside and took the old phone book out of the drawer and found Lorna’s home number, because she’s the kind of woman who’s still in the phone book.
She picked up on the second ring. I could hear a television.
“It’s Tricia Oakes,” I said. “I’m sorry to call you at home. I found something in Dad’s truck.”
The television went off.
“Is the band still on it?” Lorna said.
I stood there with the phone.
“Tricia.”
“Yes. It’s still on.”
“Then leave it on,” she said. “Bring it to me Monday at eight. Don’t open it, don’t copy it, and don’t let your brother within arm’s length of it.”
“Lorna, what is it?”
“Monday at eight,” she said.
She hung up before I could ask how she knew there was a rubber band.
Row nine
I had a Saturday shift on the line. Kasey works the station next to mine, and she’s been there since the old manager, so she hears everything.
“Your brother’s got a man walking his ground,” she said, around a mouthful of gum. “Developer out of Wenatchee. Sharma. My cousin does his surveying.”
“Walking it for what?”
She looked at me over a Gala with a soft spot.
“Honey. For houses.”
I worked the rest of my shift. Don’t ask me how. At four I drove straight to the orchard, and the gate code still worked, because Marlon had never bothered to change Dad’s birthday to anything else.
The north rows were flagged.
Orange plastic ribbon tied on the end posts, every row, all the way along Verna’s fence. Wooden stakes hammered into the ground between the trees with numbers on them in marker. There were tire ruts through the grass where somebody had driven a truck down the middle of the rows in the wet, which Dad would have killed a man for.
Row nine has Dad’s oldest Red Delicious at the end of it. He planted that tree the spring I was born. Every February I pruned it first, before anything else, because he told me to when I was twenty-seven and I never stopped.
There was a ribbon tied around its trunk.
I was still standing there when Dad’s pickup came down the lane.
Marlon got out and didn’t take his cap off this time.
“You can’t be in here,” he said.
“You’re selling it.”
“I’m selling it. One hundred and forty houses. Gideon Sharma, if you want to look him up. Closing’s in September, and the bank’s happy, and I’m happy.”
“Dad’s tree is in your houses.”
“Dad’s tree had eleven apples on it this year, Trish. I counted. Eleven.”
“Because nobody thinned it.”
“Because it’s a hundred-year-old business in a world that doesn’t want it.” He pointed at my back pocket, where the envelope wasn’t. It was in my glovebox. “And whatever he stuck in that truck, I’ll have a lawyer stand up and say he was losing it by March. He put his keys in the freezer twice that spring. Ask anybody.”
He had a lawyer’s number ready. I could see it in how he said it.
“Open it in front of a judge,” he said. “Put an eighty-four-year-old woman on the stand who hated him for forty years and see how that goes.”
He got back in the pickup and left the ruts deeper.
I untied the ribbon from Dad’s tree. There was a wooden tag on the stake beside it.
Somebody had written LOT 1 on it.
Fourteen butterscotch
Lorna’s office was at eight like she said. Deepak came and sat in the chair by the window with his coat still on.
The candy dish was on the desk. Same yellow cellophane. I counted them again. Fourteen. Either nobody ate them or Lorna kept the count up on purpose.
I put the envelope on the desk.
Lorna didn’t touch it.
“You open it,” she said. “He wanted you to be the one.”
I got the band off. It had gone tacky from a winter and a spring under that seat, and it left a gray line on the paper. I unfolded the envelope and slid out three pages.
The first one was typed. I knew the typeface. It was the same one as the will.
“Option to Purchase.”
I read it slowly, the way Dad read anything with a signature line on it, with my finger under each line.
It said that Salvatore Oakes, being the owner of the orchard and all 310 acres of it, gave his daughter Tricia the right to buy the whole of it, the land and the trees and the water rights, from him or from anybody who came to own it after him, at any time the place was offered for sale or put up as security for a loan.
The price was in the middle of the second paragraph.
Three hundred and ten dollars.
A dollar an acre.
“It has to cost something,” Lorna said. “Or it’s a gift, and a gift can be argued with. I told him that in March. He said fine, make it a dollar an acre, she can afford that.”
The second page was the signatures. Dad’s, in the pencil-hard way he wrote everything. Verna’s under it, big and shaky, with HANSEN printed underneath in case anybody doubted her. The notary’s stamp, and the raised seal I’d felt through the envelope in the shed.
The third page was in Dad’s handwriting. Register paper, torn out of the spiral, folded in thirds.
It said, “Trish. He talked me into it in your truck at Christmas. I let him. When he sells it, buy it. Prune row nine first.”
That was the whole thing.
Deepak got up and stood behind my chair. He didn’t say anything. He put his hand on the back of it.
“Lorna,” I said. “You knew.”
“I wrote it,” she said. “And I swore to that stubborn old man I wouldn’t say one word unless you walked in here holding it. You almost didn’t.”
“Is it good?”
“It’s good. Your brother took that ground with this sitting on it, whether he knew it or not. Developers don’t close on land somebody else has an option on.” She turned her monitor toward me. “But there’s something else you need to see before you get happy.”
It was the county’s records page. A filing, five months old, against all 310 acres.
Deed of trust. February 9. Two hundred forty thousand dollars. Marlon’s signature.
Verna’s table
I picked Verna’s kitchen because that’s where Dad picked.
I called Marlon from the parking lot outside Lorna’s office and told him six o’clock, and I hung up before he could ask me anything. He came at five-forty. He was a man who’d been early to every closing of his life.
Verna sat at the head of her own table with her coffee. Lorna sat next to her with the three pages in a clear sleeve. Deepak stood by the stove. I sat across from my brother.
Marlon read the option twice. The second time his lips moved.
“This is garbage,” he said. “This is a garbage piece of paper. A dollar an acre? No judge in this county will look at that and not see a confused old man. And her,” he pointed at Verna with the page, “she fought him over that fence for forty years. She’d sign anything to get back at him. You know that. Everybody knows that.”
“He brought his own pen,” Verna said.
“He put his KEYS in the FREEZER.”
“He did that in 1987 too,” Verna said. “He was tired. It was harvest.”
Marlon turned to Lorna.
“You wrote the will,” he said. “You sat right there in January and read it out and you never said a word about this.”
“It wasn’t in the estate,” Lorna said. “It was in your sister’s truck.”
He laughed, one short one, and put the sleeve down on the table and squared it with both hands.
“Fine. I’ll tell you what this really is. I sat in that flatbed with him at Christmas for an hour, and I told him the truth. I told him she’d keep that place exactly how he left it until it went broke, because she can’t do anything but what he told her. I told him I had a plan. Contracts. A crew. Real money. And he listened to me. For once in his life he listened to me. I drove him to your office myself, Lorna.”
“You did,” Lorna said. “And he came back by himself in March.”
Nobody said anything for a while. Verna drank her coffee.
“Where’d the two-forty go?” Deepak said.
Marlon looked at him like the stove had spoken.
“The crew,” he said. “The spray. The—” He stopped. “Some of it went on the house. Our house. Nia’s dad needed some help. It’s none of your business where it went, it’s a business loan, I’m a mortgage broker, I know how to carry a loan.”
“It’s due in October,” Lorna said.
“I KNOW when it’s due.”
I took the envelope from my bank out of my jacket. Three hundred-dollar bills and a ten, from my paycheck, cashed that morning at the same window where Dad got his registers. I laid them on Verna’s oilcloth one at a time, in front of him.
“Count it,” I said.
Lorna slid two more papers across. The notice that I was exercising the option, already signed. And the deed, with a line for his name.
“I recorded the option with the county at nine,” she said. “Your developer’s title company will have it by tomorrow. You can sign this tonight, and your sister takes the place and the loan on it, and the bank takes your name off that note. Or you can fight her. You’ll lose, and you’ll pay her lawyer, and you’ll pay that loan in October out of whatever you’ve got left in Seattle.”
“She can’t carry two-forty on nineteen-fifty an hour.”
“She’s not carrying it on nineteen-fifty,” Deepak said. “We put our house up. I signed at the bank this afternoon.”
That was the first I’d heard he’d gone to the bank.
Marlon looked at Deepak a long time. Then at the money.
“Give me fifty thousand,” he said. “Fifty, and I sign, and nobody has to see a courtroom.”
I didn’t say anything.
Verna got up and got him a pen out of the drawer by the sink.
He signed. He pressed so hard the pen went through the bottom of the line. Then he picked up the three hundred and ten dollars, and he counted it. All of it. He folded it once and put it in his wallet.
He stopped at the screen door with his cap in his hand.
“The pickup’s mine,” he said. “I’m keeping Dad’s pickup.”
February
I pruned row nine first.
It was the second week of February, cold enough that the shears stuck to my gloves. I parked the flatbed at the end of the row with the engine running so the cab would stay warm. Dad’s reading glasses are still folded on the dash. His thermos still rolls around the floor.
There’s a bank payment book in the glovebox now. Nineteen hundred and twelve dollars on the fifth of every month. I still work the sorting line Friday and Saturday nights to make it, and Deepak keeps a register at the kitchen table in a green spiral from the bank, because somebody has to.
The orange ribbon is in the glovebox too. I don’t know why I kept it.
The old Red Delicious had a lot of dead wood. I cut it back hard, the way Dad liked, and the cuts were clean.
When I got down off the ladder, Verna was standing at the fence in her husband’s old barn coat, holding her coffee.
“That fence of your father’s is still three feet onto my ground,” she said.
I put the shears down and went over to look at it.
If you’ve got a brother who only comes at Christmas and the Fourth, send this to the one who stayed home and kept the trees alive.
For more family reckonings with buried secrets and money disputes, read the notebook Dad hid behind the garage and the Thanksgiving bill that came with a surprise about Grandma’s passbook. If you’re in the mood for another family showdown, there’s also the $40,000 debt that brought a Dodge onto the scale.
