Prune Day Eve

Maureen Skinner came over the rise at dusk with her rucksack on one shoulder and her pruning shears poking out of the top pocket. Thirty-three years old, ten of those spent in Soitsambu, and she still got a small lift in her chest every time she saw the old apple tree against the last light.

Tonight the lift died fast.

There was a truck parked against the fence. Her fence. The one the county put up around the tree enclosure two decades before she ever touched a blade to it.

She stopped. Squinted. Knew the truck anyway. Kai Pena's white Toyota, one dented fender, a bumper sticker half peeled off. Her neighbor from three plots down. The marine cleanup foreman who spent his days hauling pollutants off the lake shore and his evenings mostly alone.

He was sitting on the tailgate with a beer. He had a camp stove set up. A folding chair. A tarp strung between the Toyota and the fence post. A man settled in for the night, and settled in thoroughly.

"Oh, come on," Maureen said, to nobody, and walked down the slope.

Kai saw her coming and lifted his bottle in a lazy wave. "Evening."

"Kai. What are you doing here?"

"Camping." He said it like it was obvious, because to him it was. "My spot. Booked it weeks ago."

"This is the tree enclosure fence. The county's oldest apple tree sits ten meters from your chair."

"I know. That's why I picked it." He took a sip. "Best view on the slope."

Maureen set her rucksack down, slower than she needed to, so he'd watch her do it. "Tomorrow at first light, I prune that tree. Which means tonight I pre-mark the cuts. Which means tonight this is my workspace."

Kai's face did something complicated. "Tomorrow's the fourteenth."

"It is."

"Then we don't have a problem. Today's the thirteenth."

"Kai." She pulled her phone out, thumbed it awake, and held the screen toward him. The calendar glowed in the dusk. Apple tree, oldest county specimen, pruning, the fourteenth. "The fourteenth. Tomorrow. I've had this booking for a year. Every year for ten years, same tree, same date."

He stared at the screen. Then he dug out his own phone, tapped around, and turned it toward her. Birthday campout, the thirteenth, a note that said hold the spot, don't let anyone talk you out of it. He'd written that note to himself. He'd apparently predicted this exact argument.

Maureen read it twice. "You pre-argued with me. In writing. Weeks ago."

"I know myself," he said, and there was the smallest grin under it. "Happy birthday, by the way."

"It's not your birthday yet. It's your birthday-eve."

"Close enough at my age. Thirty-five tomorrow. I figure the day starts when the beer opens."

She looked at the sky. Full dark coming, maybe twenty minutes. She looked at the tree, a pale shape above the fence, branches sprawling like it owned the whole hillside, which in fairness it mostly did. She looked at the camp stove, which had a kettle on it.

"How long have you been sitting there?" she asked.

"Since four."

"And you're just going to sit there all night."

"That was the plan, yes."

Maureen rubbed her forehead. She could go home and come back at four in the morning, but the whole point of arriving at dusk was marking the cuts in the last flat light, then checking them at dawn before she cut. Ten years of doing it one way. She did not love changing her method for a man with a folding chair.

"Fine," she said. "Co-existence. I mark the branches, you drink your beer, nobody talks."

"That's the friendliest thing anyone's said to me all week."

"It wasn't friendly. It was a ceasefire."

"Same thing, out here." He kicked a second folding chair open with his boot and set it near the fire ring he'd made. Then, after a beat, he turned it to face the tree instead of the fire. A small courtesy. She noticed it.

She pulled her headlamp on and let herself through the gate. The old tree smelled like apples gone soft on the ground, that sweet fermented smell that hung around it every year at pruning time. She ran her hands along the lower limbs, finding the growth from the last season, marking the ones to take with a grease pencil. Left hand high. Right hand lower. She'd done it so many times her body just moved.

Through the fence she could hear Kai moving around. The kettle going on. The clink of the bottle set down on the tailgate. He was quiet about it, quieter than she expected from a man who ran crews on the lake shore. That was something she'd never really known about him. She knew his truck, his dog, his waved hand most mornings. Not much else. Two years in this man's orbit and she knew nothing, really.

She came back through the gate with the lower branches marked and found him holding a beer out to her. Unopened.

"I don't drink on marking nights," she said.

"There's tea. Kettle's almost up."

"...Tea works."

He poured her a mug without ceremony. She sat in the second chair, boots stretched toward the coals, and for a while neither of them said anything. It wasn't bad silence. That surprised her.

"So it's your birthday-eve," she said eventually. "And you spend it alone at a fence."

"Divorced two years now." He said it easily, like reporting the weather. "Married six. First solo birthday since then. I wanted somewhere with no people in it."

"And you picked my tree."

"Best view on the slope," he repeated. Then he reached into his shirt pocket. "Hey. Since you're stuck here anyway. Can I get your opinion on something?"

She looked over. He was holding a small plastic shape, grey, sun-faded, cracked at one end. She recognized it before he even turned it.

"Is that a turn signal stalk?"

"Off my truck. Left side." He held it out. "Been meaning to fix it for four months. Signal sticks on. I have to click it back by hand like it's a light switch. Very dignified."

Maureen took it from him.

It sat in her palm differently than she expected. Lighter. The plastic had gone smooth at the tip from years of a thumb flicking it, worn down to a soft gloss. The crack ran along the base where the mounting collar had been stressed, probably yanked once by somebody in a hurry. It fit her hand neatly. Her fingers closed around it and the worn part landed right where her thumb rested, like the thing had been shaped for her grip and not his.

She turned it over. Ran her thumb down the faded ridge. There was something oddly pleasant about holding it, this little broken piece of his truck, warm from his pocket.

"You've been carrying this around," she said.

"Yeah. Well." He looked at the fire, not at her. "Kept forgetting to order the part. And then it was just... in the pocket."

"How long has it actually been in your pocket?"

He was quiet a second too long. "Since the week my wife moved out."

Maureen looked at the stalk. Then at him. Kai Pena, thirty-five tomorrow, staring into a fire with a broken turn signal in his history and a beer going warm in his hand, and she was holding the thing he'd carried for two years like a coin.

The kettle started to whistle.

Neither of them moved to take it off.

Maureen stood there with the stalk in her fist and something turning over in her chest that she couldn't name yet.

He carried this for two years. In his pocket. Next to his skin, basically. A broken piece of his marriage that he never fixed and never threw out and never talked about.

And he'd just handed it to her.

"You could have ordered the part," she said. "Any time in two years."

"Yeah."

"You didn't want to fix it."

He looked at her then. Just looked. The fire popped behind him and the light moved on his face and he didn't say anything, which was an answer all by itself.

She didn't know what came over her. Honestly. She'd like to tell you there was a plan, but there wasn't. Her feet moved and then her arm did and she stepped in close, close enough to smell woodsmoke on his jacket, and she pressed the worn tip of the stalk flat against his chest. Right over the sternum. Pushed, a little.

"Here's my opinion," she said. "You keep the spot. No strings, it's yours tonight either way."

His breath stopped. She felt it happen under the plastic.

"You've been carrying a broken thing for two years because letting go wasn't your job. Somebody else did the leaving. You just held the evidence." She pressed a hair harder. "So. This is a separate thing from the spot, and you can say no and we just drink tea. But if you want to, you do what I say until dawn. All of it."

The silence stretched out long. Long enough that she started composing her apology, mentally, the one she'd need when he laughed or got angry or packed up his tarp.

Instead his eyes went dark. She watched it happen. The easy campfire warmth in them just drained down into something lower