The Red Maple
“Either get that junk off your house, or I’m calling the police!”
Mrs. Whitmore was standing at the end of our driveway in a long gray coat buttoned to her chin. Eighty-one years old. Five foot nothing. Pointing one bony finger at my sons like she was casting a spell.
Max froze on the front porch with a staple gun in his hand.
Theo dropped the milk jug he was holding. It bounced down the steps and rolled into the grass.
I came out the front door with a roll of duct tape around my wrist like a bracelet.
“Mrs. Whitmore,” I said. “Is something wrong?”
“Is something wrong?” She swept her hand at our house. At the bedsheet ghosts hanging from the porch rafters. At the cardboard tombstones stuck in the flowerbeds. At the lanterns lined up along the front walk. “Look at this. Look at it. It looks like a landfill exploded.”
Theo’s face crumpled.
He’s seven. He made the tombstones.
My name is Laurel Pierce. I’m thirty-nine.
I live in a little white Cape Cod on Larkspur Lane in Elm Grove, Wisconsin, with my two sons. Max is eleven. Theo is seven.
My husband, Joel, died two years ago this November.
And after Joel passed away, Halloween became our thing.
It was always Joel’s thing first.
He was a shop teacher at Elm Grove High. Twenty-two years. He could build anything out of anything. A birdhouse out of an old drawer. A go-kart out of a lawnmower and a shopping cart. A cello stand out of a hockey stick for a girl in his third period who couldn’t afford a real one.
And every October, he went crazy.
Not store-bought crazy. Joel never bought a single Halloween decoration in his life. He said store-bought stuff had no soul.
“Anybody can buy a plastic skeleton at Target,” he’d say. “It takes a real artist to make one out of PVC pipe and pool noodles.”
So he made everything. Every year. With the boys.
Ghosts out of old bedsheets, stuffed with plastic grocery bags so their heads were round. Lanterns out of empty milk jugs, with faces cut into them and battery tea lights inside. Tombstones out of cereal boxes, painted gray and lettered with terrible jokes.
HERE LIES LES MOORE. NO LES, NO MORE.
I TOLD YOU I WAS SICK.
RIP JOEL’S DIET. 1987–1987.
It was nothing special.
It was cardboard and bedsheets and milk jugs and tape.
But families would stop on the sidewalk to see what the boys had made. Little kids pointed at the ghosts. Parents laughed at the tombstones. The high school kids who’d had Joel for shop class drove by slowly and honked.
Joel would sit on the front porch steps in his flannel shirt with a mug of cider, grinning like he’d built the Eiffel Tower.
“Look at that, Laur,” he’d say. “That’s ours. We made that.”
He died on November third. Two years ago.
An aneurysm. In his brain. He was forty-one. He was grading birdhouses in his classroom after school. A student found him on the floor next to a half-finished cardinal feeder.
They told me he didn’t feel anything. They said it was like a light switching off.
I don’t know if that’s true. I hope it is.
That first year, the decorations were still up when he died. The ghosts were still hanging from the porch. The milk jugs were still lined up along the walk.
I couldn’t take them down.
I left them up until Christmas. Then until January. The ghosts got gray and soggy in the snow. The tombstones fell over. The neighbors started to stare.
In February, Max took them down himself. He was nine. I came home from work and found him on a stepladder on the porch, crying, pulling down the last ghost.
“Dad wouldn’t want them to look like this,” he said.
The next October, I didn’t think we’d do it.
I didn’t think I could.
But on the first Saturday in October, Theo came downstairs with an old bedsheet dragging behind him.
“Mom,” he said. “When do we make the ghosts?”
I looked at him. Five years old. With Joel’s cowlick and Joel’s crooked smile.
“You want to?” I said.
He nodded.
“Dad would want to,” he said.
So we did.
We sat on the living room floor with bedsheets and grocery bags and a box of markers. We made five ghosts. They were lumpy and uneven. Theo drew a mustache on one. Max drew Joel’s glasses on another.
We cut faces into milk jugs. We painted cereal boxes gray. Max wrote the jokes. Joel’s jokes. He remembered every single one.
HERE LIES LES MOORE.
We hung it all up on a Saturday morning in the rain.
When we were done, the three of us stood in the front yard and looked at it.
“It’s not as good as Dad’s,” Max said quietly.
“No,” I said. “It’s ours.”
That’s what Halloween became for us. After.
Every year, starting the first weekend in October, we’d spend our Saturdays on the living room floor making decorations. We’d play Joel’s old playlist. Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Monster Mash and that awful Ray Parker Jr. Ghostbusters song he loved.
We’d talk about him. While our hands were busy. It was easier that way. Easier than sitting at the kitchen table and trying to talk about him with nothing to do.
“Remember when Dad tried to make a pumpkin catapult?”
“Remember when the ghost blew into Mr. Kowalski’s pool?”
“Remember when Dad dressed up as a hot dog and the dog bit him?”
We’d laugh. Sometimes we’d cry. Sometimes both.
It was the only time of year we really talked about him.
The rest of the year, it was too hard.
So when Mrs. Whitmore stood at the end of our driveway pointing at my seven-year-old son’s cereal-box tombstones and calling them junk, something in me went very cold.
But I didn’t yell.
I had two boys standing on the porch watching me.
“Mrs. Whitmore,” I said carefully. “The boys made all of this themselves. It’s… it’s something we do. For their dad.”
“I don’t care what it’s for,” she said. “It’s ugly. And it’s in my way.”
“In your way?”
She pointed across the street. At her house. A narrow gray Victorian with black shutters and a front porch with one white rocking chair.
“I sit at that window every morning,” she said. “Every morning. With my coffee. And now all I see are your filthy bedsheets flapping around.”
I looked at her house. At the big front window on the first floor, with lace curtains.
Then I turned and looked where she was looking.
At my front yard.
At the red maple tree in the middle of it.
The tree was about twenty feet tall now. Joel planted it the year we moved in. Ten years ago. It was just a sapling then. A stick with leaves. Now it was tall and full and, every October, it turned the most incredible red. Like it was on fire.
The ghosts were hanging from the porch rafters, right behind it. When the wind blew, they swung out in front of the branches.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “What does the tree have to do with—”
“Teach your brats some manners,” Mrs. Whitmore said.
Max flinched.
“If you won’t clear that junk,” she said, “I will.”
She turned around and marched back across the street. Up her porch steps. Into her gray house.
The door slammed.
Theo was crying.
Max was standing very still on the porch with the staple gun in his hand. His jaw was tight. He was eleven. Old enough to be angry. Too young to know what to do with it.
“Can she do that?” Max asked. “Can she call the police on us? For decorations?”
“No,” I said. “She can’t.”
“Then why’d she say it?”
I didn’t have an answer.
I wanted to keep the peace.
That’s what I do. That’s what I’ve always done. Joel used to say I’d apologize to a chair if I bumped into it.
So that night, I baked her a pumpkin pie.
From scratch. Joel’s grandmother’s recipe. With real pumpkin I roasted in the oven, not the canned kind. I made the crust by hand. I crimped the edges with a fork, the way Joel’s grandmother showed me when we were first married.
I carried it across the street at seven o’clock. Still warm. Wrapped in a dish towel.
I knocked on her door.
Nothing.
I knocked again.
“Mrs. Whitmore? It’s Laurel. From across the street. I brought you a pie.”
I heard footsteps inside. I saw the lace curtain on the front window move. Just an inch.
The door didn’t open.
“Please,” I said through the door. “They made it all themselves. My boys. It’s been hard for them since their father died. It’s the one thing they look forward to all year. We’ll take everything down on November first. I promise. Every single piece.”
Silence.
Then her voice. Through the door.
“I sit at that window every morning to look at my beautiful red maple,” she snapped. “Every single morning. For years. And now all I see are dangling bedsheets.”
My beautiful red maple.
“It’s my tree, Mrs. Whitmore,” I said. “It’s in my yard.”
“I don’t care whose yard it’s in!”
“I’ll move the ghosts,” I said. “I can hang them on the other side of the porch. Away from the tree. So you can see it.”
Silence.
“Teach your brats some manners,” she said. “If you won’t clear that junk, I will.”
The porch light went off.
I stood there on her dark porch with a warm pumpkin pie in my hands.
After a while, I set it down on her doormat. I tucked the dish towel around it. I walked home.
That night, I moved the ghosts.
All five of them. I climbed up on the stepladder in the dark and unhooked them from the rafters on the left side of the porch, where they swung in front of the maple. I rehung them on the right side. By the garage. Where nobody could see them from across the street.
It took an hour. I was crying the whole time. I don’t know why. They were just bedsheets.
Max came out in his pajamas and held the ladder for me.
“Why are we moving them?” he asked.
“So Mrs. Whitmore can see the tree.”
“But it’s our tree.”
“I know.”
“Dad planted it.”
“I know, buddy.”
He was quiet for a while. Holding the ladder.
“Why does she care so much about our tree?” he asked.
I didn’t know.
I wish I’d asked.
The next afternoon, I pulled into the driveway after work with the boys in the back seat.
I’d picked them up from after-school care. Max was telling me about a kid in his class who’d eaten a whole glue stick on a dare. Theo was singing the Monster Mash under his breath.
Then I turned into the driveway.
And I froze.
Our entire Halloween display had been destroyed.
The ghosts were lying in the gutter at the end of the driveway. All five of them. Torn down from the rafters. Soaked from the sprinklers. One of them had been stepped on. There was a muddy shoe print across its face. The one with Joel’s glasses drawn on it.
The milk jug lanterns were crushed. Flattened. Like somebody had stomped on every single one. The little battery tea lights were scattered across the front walk. Some of them still flickering.
And the cardboard tombstones.
They’d been ripped out of the flowerbeds. Torn in half. Stuffed into our garbage can at the end of the driveway. I could see the corner of one sticking out of the lid.
HERE LIES LES MO—
The rest was torn off.
Behind me, in the back seat, it went completely silent.
Theo stopped singing.
I turned around.
He was staring out the window at the gutter. At the ghost with Joel’s glasses. Lying face-down in the wet leaves with a shoe print on it.
He didn’t cry. That was the worst part. He didn’t make a sound.
He just stared.
Max unbuckled his seatbelt. He opened the car door. He got out and walked to the end of the driveway. He knelt down in the gutter in his school uniform and picked up the ghost with Joel’s glasses.
He held it in both hands.
Water dripped off it onto his shoes.
Across the street, Mrs. Whitmore stepped out onto her porch.
She was holding a cup of coffee. She was wearing her gray coat. She stood at the top of her steps and looked across the street at us.
At my son kneeling in the gutter holding a wet bedsheet.
“See?” she called. “Doesn’t the whole street look nicer?”
I got out of the car.
I walked to the end of my driveway. I stood next to Max. I put my hand on his shoulder.
“Did you go onto my property?” I asked her.
My voice was very calm. I don’t know how.
“I fixed a problem you refused to fix,” Mrs. Whitmore said.
“I moved the ghosts. Last night. To the other side of the porch. So you could see the tree.”
She took a sip of coffee.
“Not far enough,” she said.
I was just about to call the police.
I had my phone in my hand. I’d already opened it. I’d already typed in the nine and the first one.
We have a doorbell camera. Joel installed it three years ago after somebody stole a package. It records everything. I knew exactly what I’d find on it. A small old woman in a gray coat, walking across my lawn, climbing my porch steps, yanking down my children’s decorations.
Trespassing. Destruction of property. Maybe more.
I could call the police. I could press charges. I could make her pay for it.
I looked down at Max.
He was still holding the ghost. Looking at the muddy shoe print across his father’s drawn-on glasses.
I looked at Theo. Still in the back seat. Still staring. Still not making a sound.
I looked up at the red maple.
Joel’s tree.
It was at its peak. That week. The most beautiful week of the year. Every single leaf was red. Deep, dark red. Like wine. Like fire. Against the gray October sky.
I looked at it for a long time.
And then, for the first time since I got home, I smiled.
An idea had just occurred to me.
I put my phone back in my pocket.
“Max,” I said quietly. “Take your brother inside. Get him a snack. I’ll be in in a minute.”
Max looked up at me.
“Aren’t you going to call the cops?”
“Not yet.”
“Mom—”
“Trust me,” I said. “Take Theo inside.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he nodded. He opened the back door of the car. He took Theo’s hand. Theo climbed out like a sleepwalker. Max walked him up the front steps and into the house.
He took the wet ghost with him. The one with Joel’s glasses.
Across the street, Mrs. Whitmore was still standing on her porch. Watching me. Sipping her coffee.
I looked at her.
I didn’t say anything.
She looked back at me. Waiting for me to yell. To cry. To threaten her.
I didn’t.
I just stood there at the end of my driveway. Smiling.
She frowned. She looked uncertain. Then annoyed.
Then she turned around and went back inside her house.
The door closed.
I waited until Mrs. Whitmore went back inside her house.
Then I moved.
It took less than a minute.
I knelt down in the gutter. I picked up the other four ghosts. Wet and heavy and muddy.
I walked across my front lawn to the red maple.
The lowest branches were about six feet off the ground. I’m five-seven. I could reach them if I stood on my toes.
I took the first ghost by the corners and threw it up over a low branch on the front side of the tree. The side facing the street. It caught. It hung there. A white bedsheet with a round head and a mustache drawn on in Sharpie.
The second ghost. Another branch. Higher. I had to jump.
The third. The fourth.
I stepped back.
Four ghosts. Hanging in the branches of the red maple. Dead center. Right in front of the brightest, reddest leaves. Swaying in the October wind.
Directly in front of Mrs. Whitmore’s window.
Then I picked up the one tombstone that wasn’t completely torn. It was bent but readable. I stuck it in the dirt at the base of the tree.
I TOLD YOU I WAS SICK.
I went inside.
Then I waited.
I stood at my own front window, behind my own curtains, and watched her house.
Max came and stood next to me.
“What did you do?”
“Watch,” I said.
A few minutes later, she came back outside.
She had a fresh cup of coffee. She stepped onto her porch. She lifted the cup to her lips.
She looked across the street.
She took one look at the red maple and stopped dead.
The coffee cup stopped halfway to her mouth.
Four ghosts. Hanging in her beautiful red maple. Right in the middle of her view. Muddy and lumpy and swaying in the wind. With a mustache on one of them. And a cereal-box tombstone at the bottom.
Her face turned dark red.
She set her coffee cup down on the porch railing so hard it sloshed over the side.
She came down her porch steps. Across the street. Fast. Faster than I’d ever seen an eighty-one-year-old woman move.
She stopped at the edge of my lawn.
“What the hell did you do?!”
I opened my front door. I stepped out onto the porch.
“I decorated my tree,” I said.
“Your tree?” Her voice cracked. “Take them down! Take them down right now!”
“No.”
“That’s my tree!”
“No, Mrs. Whitmore,” I said. “It isn’t. It’s in my yard. On my property. My husband planted it ten years ago. With his own hands. I was standing right here.”
She stared at me.
“You can destroy my porch,” I said. “You can trespass on my lawn and rip down my children’s decorations and throw them in the trash. But you can’t take them out of my tree. Because if you set one foot on my lawn again, I’m calling the police. I have you on camera from this morning. Every second of it.”
Her face went from red to white.
“You wouldn’t,” she whispered.
“I almost did,” I said. “Ten minutes ago. I had my phone in my hand.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
“Because I wanted you to see what it feels like,” I said. “To look out your window at something you love and have somebody ruin it.”
She didn’t say anything.
She was staring at the tree. At the ghosts. At the mustache. At the swaying white sheets against the red leaves.
Her hands were shaking.
Not with anger.
Something else.
“Take them down,” she said. But her voice was different now. Small. “Please. Please take them down.”
“Why?” I asked. “Why does this tree matter so much to you? It’s not yours. You’ve never even been in my yard before today. Why do you sit at that window every morning and look at my tree?”
She looked at me.
And her face crumpled.
Her chin trembled. Her eyes filled up. Her mouth opened and closed.
“Because it’s Bernard’s,” she whispered.
I didn’t understand.
“Who’s Bernard?”
She didn’t answer. She was staring at the tree. Tears were running down her face now.
“Your husband planted it,” she said. “Joel. Yes. I know. I watched him do it. Ten years ago. October. He dug the hole himself. With a shovel. In the rain.”
“I know. I was there.”
“But he didn’t plant it for you,” she said.
I stared at her.
“He planted it for Bernard,” she said. “My husband. He planted it for my husband.”
Behind me, the front door opened. Max came out onto the porch. Then Theo, holding his brother’s hand.
Mrs. Whitmore saw them. She looked at Theo. At his tear-stained face. At the cowlick.
She made a sound. Like something breaking.
And she sat down.
Right there. On the curb at the edge of my lawn. In her long gray coat. Like her legs had just given out.
She put her face in her hands.
I didn’t know what to do.
I stood on my porch with my sons behind me. Looking at an eighty-one-year-old woman crying on my curb.
The woman who’d destroyed everything my boys made.
The woman who’d called them brats.
I wanted to be angry. I was angry. I wanted to go inside and close the door and let her sit there.
But I could hear Joel.
I could hear him so clearly it was like he was standing next to me.
Laur. Go sit with her.
I walked down the porch steps. Across the lawn. I sat down on the curb next to her. Not close. A couple of feet away.
The boys stayed on the porch. Watching.
I didn’t say anything. I just sat there.
After a while, Mrs. Whitmore lifted her face out of her hands.
“Bernard planted a red maple,” she said. “In our front yard. The day we moved in. 1962. We’d been married three weeks. We were twenty-two. He said every house needs a tree that turns red in the fall. So you always know it’s home.”
She looked across the street at her house. At the front yard. At an empty patch of grass in the middle of it. With a stump, gray and cracked, almost hidden in the lawn.
“That tree was fifty-three years old,” she said. “It was enormous. You couldn’t see the sky through it. Every October, it turned red. Every October, for fifty-three years, Bernard and I sat on that porch and drank coffee and watched it turn.”
“What happened to it?”
“A storm,” she said. “July of 2015. A big one. Straight-line winds. It split down the middle. Half of it came down on our garage.” Her voice broke. “Bernard stood in the front yard in the rain and watched them cut it up with chainsaws. He didn’t say anything. He just stood there. He was eighty.”
“That fall,” Mrs. Whitmore said, “Bernard was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.”
I closed my eyes.
“Stage four. They said he had a year. Maybe less. He didn’t want to go to the hospital. He wanted to die at home. So they put a hospital bed in our front room. By the big window.”
She pointed across the street. At the big front window. With the lace curtains.
“He lay in that bed for eleven months,” she said. “He couldn’t get up. He couldn’t go outside. All he could do was look out that window.”
She looked at me.
“And all he could see,” she said, “was the stump.”
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