Another Year on the Lot

I took the tree lot job because my life had gotten so predictable I could schedule my boredom. Thirty-four years old, same apartment six years, same grocery list most Tuesdays. In early November I saw the sign, SEASONAL HELP, taped to a lamppost, and I called the number before I could talk myself out of it. My roommate said it was a midlife crisis arriving three years early. I said maybe it was just a crisis.

Three weeks in, I can report that selling Christmas trees is cold, slow, and mostly standing. I've learned the difference between a Fraser fir and a Nordmann fir, and I've learned that men over fifty will always ask if the tree is fresh, as if I'd be stocking dead ones. The pay is nothing. But it's something that isn't my desk, and that turned out to be worth more than I figured.

Tonight is the last Tuesday of November, and it's dead. The manager, a broad tired man named Jace, sent the other clerk home at seven because nobody was coming out in this cold. So it's me, the strings of colored bulbs looped along the fencing, and maybe two hundred firs standing in their rows like a forest that got drafted. I've walked the rows four times. I know the drill. Keep the stand reservoirs topped, shake the needles out of one tree for a family that might still show, lock the cash box.

Around eight the lights start doing something wrong. Not flickering exactly, more like breathing, dimming and coming back with a little hesitation, like the lot is deciding whether to stay awake. I stand at the register and watch a bulb over the gate fade to orange and recover. I think, great, the wiring out here is older than me.

Then everything goes black. The bulbs, the streetlamp on the corner, the lit windows of the strip two blocks down. All of it, gone at once. The dark out here is total in a way city dark never is, and I stand there holding my phone flashlight like it's a candle.

Jace calls from the house where he keeps the office, and I hear him before I see him, boots crunching the gravel. "Con Ed says it's a feeder problem, could be hours." He's got his coat half on and keys in his fist. "Look, I can't leave you standing out here. There's a wait spot across the street, funeral home's got a generator. They let the neighborhood use the lobby when the power's down. Go get warm, I'll lock up."

So that's how I end up crossing a dead street with my phone held out in front of me, toward a funeral home with one lit window. I want to note the joke available here, working a tree lot and crossing to a funeral home, and the universe has a sense of humor, but honestly it was just cold and I wanted to sit down.

The funeral home is called something dignified, Hollis and something, and the front doors are unlocked. Inside, the waiting room is warm and lit by overhead fluorescents running off a generator somewhere in back. There are four other people from the block already in there, a guy in a delivery jacket, two older women sharing a phone charger, a young man in a puffy vest, everyone pretending not to be bored. Fluorescent light does nobody any favors. I find a chair against the wall and settle in with my coat still on.

Then I look up at the reception desk, because someone comes out of the back door behind it, and my stomach does a thing I wasn't ready for.

It's Noor.

Noor, who I dated for about four months five years ago, when I was twenty-nine and she was thirty-one. We met at Ayesha and Mario's wedding, I was in the bridal party and she was a friend of Mario's from college, and we fell into it fast and then out of it slowly, the worst way, no fight, just two people who couldn't figure out where to put each other. She's a funeral director. Of course she is. Of all the lit rooms in the blackout, I walk into hers.

She sees me at the same moment. There's a beat where neither of us says anything, and I watch her decide whether to be professional or human. "Sam," she says finally, and her voice hasn't changed, low and a little dry.

"Noor. Hi. You work here."

"I do, yes!" She comes around the desk, and I get up because sitting felt wrong all of a sudden. "You work across the street now?"

"Just for the season. Tree lot." I gesture at nothing. "Jace sent us over. Power's out."

"I noticed." A small pause. "There's a generator, it'll hold all night if it has to. Can I get you something? There's tea, the electric kettle works."

"Tea would be good, yeah."

She goes back and I sit back down and do not look at the desk like an idiot for two full minutes. The other people in the room have their own lives and their own phones and no idea that I once drove this woman to the coast at three in the morning on a whim, back when I did whims. That's the part that gets me. I've spent five years becoming careful, and Noor knew me before.

She comes back with two mugs instead of one and sits in the chair next to mine instead of going behind the desk, which I choose to read as friendly and not devastating. The tea is the plain orange pekoe kind that lives in office kitchens. It's hot and I'm grateful.

"So," she says. "Five years."

"About that, yeah."

"You look good."

"You look exactly the same," I say, which comes out wrong, and she laughs, and the laugh I remember too, quiet and real. We fill in the basics. She's been here four years now, took over from the previous director. I still do the desk job, still in the same apartment. The outage, we agree, is enormous and boring. The two older women are arguing softly about whether the blackout counts as an emergency or an inconvenience.

And here's what I notice, somewhere in the second cup of tea. The silences fit. That's the thing I forgot. There are gaps in the talk, ten seconds, twenty, and they don't itch. With most people I rush to fill the quiet. With her I never did, and apparently I still don't. I watch the delivery guy pace the length of the room and back, and Noor follows my eyes and says, "He's done eleven laps," and I say, "Twelve," and we leave it there.

She's the one who breaks the last silence, and what she breaks it with is not what I expect.

"You know I hold the lease on your lot."

I turn to look at her. "The what?"

"The tree lot. The company that runs it subleases from a property group, and I hold the ground lease through the funeral home. It's why Jace sends you all over here. Old arrangement. It has nothing to do with you or your job, by the