Page 93 of Love Bound

I look at him. "I don’t understand. Did you do this? How did you do this?"

"Ralph Burke did. All these years, he and Geo have been coming out here and trimming trees."

"Oh my god." I grab his hand. "And you think—"

"No, I know. These have been growing for over a decade. Not all of them are Christmas worthy, but even if you lost five percent, that's still a lot of trees. Some of them are over twelve feet high. You have at least fifty of them over twenty."

"Yeah, my dad planted some years before," I explain.

"After costs, you are sitting on a chunk of money. Lots of nest eggs."

I swallow. "How many eggs?"

He grins again and then turns to the crop of trees. "About ninety thousand eggs."

"Are you kidding me?"

I lean hard against a fir tree—a real fir tree, not one from the crop. "Well, I’d have to get a crew in here, and people and trucks, then find a buyer. I mean—"

"Done."

"What do you mean?"

He rubs his hands together. "As the kids say, 'I hooked you up.'" He pauses a moment and spreads his hands. "I mean, it's your call—your family's call. This way you can be self-sufficient. You get your imaging machine and whatever else you need and give the clinic a makeover."

"Or pay off some of Travis's school debt," I muse.

Finn catches my eye and tucks his hands in his back pockets.

"What? What have you done?" I ask.

"That's taken care of already."

My mouth opens, but he doesn’t give me a chance to interrupt him.

"I talked to Devon and Laurel and then I approached Travis." He holds up a hand. "You can complain all you want, but these are not going to be your bills. They're his. This way, his school debt is erased, and his next three years are taken care of."

I try to interject, but he holds his hand up even higher. "Listen, it's his life, not yours. And I wanted to do it."

I'm surprised, but more than that I'm shocked by Devon and Laurel going behind my back, not even discussing this with me. And then I soften. I always complain that I have to do everything. Maybe I don’t. Letting go is a part of that. I am already indebted to this man. For my life. Why does it matter that decisions are made without me? I don’t have all the answers anyway. And that's okay.

"If you thought you were going to pay it off yourself, well, you can take some of this money you're going to make—about twenty grand after you split it with the amazing Russos—and then help me plant a memorial garden here. And we can regrow a patch of trees for some other rainy day."

The garden.

He means his garden for families.

Suddenly, I could see it all. Rolling grass, wildflowers, hostas, ferns, bee balm, black-eyed Susans, lupines, a crop of sunflowers. Lilacs in spring and nasturtiums in the summer. Granite benches, little shrines. A place for siblings to come and play and build stone cairns. A place to remember those little ones who are gone.

I push off from the tree, step forward, and hug him. I hold him gently, this man with all these ideas.

But on the way back, something bothers me about the math.

***

We trudge back along the narrow trail, hand in hand, except where the trail narrows, back to the little road with the strip of green running down the middle. We start to pass the clinic when I realize Cory is standing in the driveway holding something.

Unlike most kids who jump up and down when they’re excited, or dance around, Cory squeals, sounding like a seal as he flaps his hands. But you never know why. It could be because he's cut himself, or that he has a new Lego kit. It's called "stimming" and it's what Cory does sometimes when he's excited or stressed.