I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.
“He’d look at it every day,” Mrs. Whitmore said. “Every morning. I’d bring him his coffee and he’d look out that window at the stump and his face would just… fall. Every single morning. Like he was losing it all over again.”
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
“Your husband used to come over,” she said. “Joel. He’d shovel our walk in the winter. He’d mow our grass in the summer. He never asked. He just did it. He and Bernard would sit on our porch and talk. About baseball. About woodworking. Bernard was a carpenter. Fifty years.”
“I didn’t know,” I said. “I knew Joel helped you sometimes. I didn’t know they were friends.”
“They were,” Mrs. Whitmore said. “Very good friends. Bernard used to call him ‘the kid.’ ‘The kid came by. The kid fixed the gutter. The kid brought me a beer I’m not supposed to have.’” She almost smiled. “Joel brought him a beer every Friday. Even after the cancer. Especially after the cancer.”
“One day in September,” she said, “Joel came over to visit. Bernard was in the bed by the window. And Bernard said something to him. I was in the kitchen. I heard it.”
She stopped. She pressed her lips together.
“What did he say?” I asked quietly.
“He said, ‘Kid, I’m not going to see that tree turn red again. I’m going to die looking at a stump.’”
The wind picked up. The ghosts swayed in the branches of the maple. The red leaves rustled.
“Joel didn’t say anything,” Mrs. Whitmore said. “He just sat there with Bernard for a while. Then he went home.”
She turned and looked at me.
“The next morning,” she said, “I woke up at six o’clock to the sound of a shovel.”
I remembered.
I hadn’t thought about it in years. But I remembered.
October of 2016. We’d been in the house a year. I woke up one Saturday morning and Joel wasn’t in bed. I went downstairs. He wasn’t in the kitchen. I looked out the front window.
He was in the front yard. In the rain. Digging a hole.
There was a tree lying on its side next to him. A sapling. About eight feet tall. Its roots wrapped in burlap.
I went out on the porch in my bathrobe.
“Joel,” I said. “What are you doing? It’s six in the morning. It’s raining.”
“Planting a tree,” he said.
“Why?”
He stopped digging. He leaned on the shovel. He looked across the street at the Whitmores’ house. At the big front window.
“Because every house needs a tree that turns red in the fall,” he said. “So you know it’s home.”
I thought it was just a Joel thing to say. I went back inside. I made coffee.
I didn’t know.
I didn’t know he was quoting Bernard.
“He drove all the way to a nursery in Waukesha,” Mrs. Whitmore said. “At five in the morning. He bought the biggest red maple they had. He picked the one that was already starting to turn. He planted it right there.” She pointed at the tree. “Right in the middle of your yard. Exactly where Bernard could see it from his bed. Exactly in the line of the window.”
I looked at the tree.
I looked at Mrs. Whitmore’s front window.
I’d never noticed. In ten years, I’d never noticed. The tree wasn’t in the middle of my yard. It was a little off to the left. Slightly crooked. I’d always thought Joel just eyeballed it wrong.
It was lined up perfectly with her window.
“Bernard woke up that morning,” Mrs. Whitmore said, “and I brought him his coffee. And he looked out the window. Like he always did. At the stump.”
She stopped. She couldn’t go on for a moment.
“And then he looked across the street,” she said. “And there was a red maple. In your front yard. Brand new. Just planted. With half its leaves already turned.”
She was crying so hard now she could barely talk.
“He cried,” she said. “My Bernard. Fifty-four years of marriage. I saw him cry three times. When his mother died. When our son was born. And that morning.”
“He lived six more weeks,” Mrs. Whitmore said. “Every morning, I’d bring him his coffee. And he’d look out that window at Joel’s tree. And he’d watch it turn. A little redder every day. He’d say, ‘Look, Edie. It’s almost all red now. Look at it.’”
She wiped her face with both hands.
“He died on November ninth,” she said. “In the morning. With his coffee. Looking out that window.” She swallowed. “The tree was completely red. Every leaf. It was the most beautiful I’ve ever seen it.”
I sat on the curb next to her. I couldn’t speak.
Behind me, on the porch, I heard Max make a small sound.
“I’ve sat at that window every morning since,” Mrs. Whitmore said. “For eight years. With my coffee. In Bernard’s chair. Looking at that tree.” She shook her head. “I talk to him. Isn’t that stupid? An old woman talking to a tree. I tell him about my day. About the neighbors. About the Brewers. I tell him I miss him.”
“It’s not stupid,” I said.
“It’s the only place I can still find him,” she said. “In that tree. Joel gave me that. He gave both of us that. Bernard got to see one more October. And I got somewhere to put my grief.”
She looked at the ghosts hanging in the branches.
“And then this October,” she said quietly, “I sat down at the window. And there were bedsheets. Flapping in front of it. And I couldn’t see him anymore.”
I looked at the tree.
At the four muddy ghosts hanging in it. Blocking the red leaves. Swaying in front of the window where an old woman had been talking to her dead husband every morning for eight years.
I felt sick.
“Mrs. Whitmore,” I said. “I didn’t know. I swear to God, I didn’t know.”
“I know you didn’t,” she said. “Joel never told you. He told me once he wouldn’t. He said it was between him and Bernard.”
“But you could have told me.”
“I know.” She looked down at her hands. “I should have. When you came over with the pie. I should have opened the door and told you. Instead I yelled at you. I yelled at your boys. And then this morning I…”
She stopped.
“I came over here and tore everything down,” she said. “Like a crazy woman. I ripped your children’s decorations off the porch and stomped on them. I don’t even know why. I’ve never done anything like that in my life.”
“I know why,” I said quietly.
She looked at me.
“Because you’re grieving,” I said. “And the tree is the only place you can put it. And somebody got in the way.”
Mrs. Whitmore stared at me.
“That’s what the decorations are for us,” I said. “Joel loved Halloween. He made everything. Every ghost. Every tombstone. Every milk jug. With the boys. Every year.” I looked at the ghosts in the tree. “After he died, we kept doing it. It’s the only time we really talk about him. When our hands are busy. When we’re making something he would’ve made.”
I pointed at the ghost hanging lowest in the tree. The one with the mustache.
“Theo drew that mustache,” I said. “Because Joel grew one every Movember for charity. And it was terrible. It looked like a caterpillar.”
Mrs. Whitmore made a sound. Half laugh. Half sob.
“I remember that mustache,” she said. “Bernard told him to shave it. Every single November.”
“And the one you stepped on,” I said. “In the gutter. With the shoe print.”
Mrs. Whitmore closed her eyes.
“Max drew his dad’s glasses on it,” I said. “Max is eleven. He’s the one who took the decorations down by himself when Joel died. Because I couldn’t. He stood on a ladder in February and cried and took them down because I couldn’t do it.”
Mrs. Whitmore put her hand over her mouth.
“So when you stepped on that ghost,” I said, “you stepped on his dad.”
She cried.
Really cried. Sitting on my curb in her gray coat, with her face in her hands. The kind of crying you can’t stop once it starts. The kind I’d done on the bathroom floor the week after Joel died. The kind Max did on that ladder.
I didn’t say anything.
I just moved over on the curb. A little closer.
And I put my hand on her back.
Behind me, I heard footsteps.
I turned around.
Max was walking down the front steps. Across the lawn. He was holding the ghost. The one with Joel’s glasses and the shoe print. It was still wet.
He stopped in front of Mrs. Whitmore.
She looked up at him. Her face was a wreck. Red and swollen and wet.
Max held out the ghost.
“This is my dad,” he said.
Mrs. Whitmore looked at it. At the drawn-on glasses. At the muddy shoe print across the face.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry, honey.”
Max didn’t say anything for a long moment.
“He planted that tree for your husband?” he finally asked.
Mrs. Whitmore nodded.
“For real?”
“For real.”
Max looked at the tree. Then at the old woman on the curb. Then at the ghost in his hands.
“Then I guess,” he said slowly, “it’s kind of both of theirs.”
Mrs. Whitmore stared at him.
Then she reached out. Very slowly. Like she was afraid he’d pull away.
She touched the ghost. The muddy shoe print on its face.
“Can I fix it?” she asked. “Can I wash it? I have a washing machine. And bleach. I can get the mud out.”
Max looked at me.
I nodded.
Max held out the ghost.
Mrs. Whitmore took it. She held it in her lap. On top of her gray coat. Like it was a baby.
Then Theo came down the porch steps.
He walked across the lawn in his socks. He didn’t have shoes on. He stopped in front of Mrs. Whitmore.
He looked at her very seriously. Seven years old. With Joel’s cowlick and Joel’s crooked smile and Joel’s way of looking at you like he was trying to figure out how you worked.
“Did your husband like Halloween?” he asked.
Mrs. Whitmore blinked.
“He… he loved it,” she said. “He used to carve pumpkins. Big ones. With his carving tools. From the shop. He could carve anything. A cat. A castle. The Brewers logo.”
Theo’s eyes got big.
“He could carve the Brewers logo into a pumpkin?”
“Every year,” Mrs. Whitmore said. “Every single year. People used to drive by to see it.”
Theo looked at the tree. At the four ghosts hanging in it.
“Then maybe,” he said, “we should make him a ghost too.”
Mrs. Whitmore stopped breathing.
“What?” she whispered.
“For the tree,” Theo said simply. “We have ghosts for my dad. Your husband should get one. It’s his tree too.” He thought about it. “We could draw on it. What did he look like?”
Mrs. Whitmore stared at my son.
Then she started to laugh. And cry. At the same time. Sitting on the curb with a muddy ghost in her lap.
“He had a bald head,” she said. “And big ears. And a red flannel cap he wore every day from October to April.”
“We can draw that,” Theo said confidently. “I’m really good at ears.”
That’s how it happened.
I wouldn’t have believed it if somebody had told me that morning.
By six o’clock that evening, Mrs. Edith Whitmore, eighty-one years old, was sitting on my living room floor.
In her gray coat. With her shoes off. With a bedsheet in her lap and a Sharpie in her hand.
Theo was sitting next to her. Directing.
“Bigger ears,” he said. “Bigger. He had really big ears, right?”
“Enormous,” Mrs. Whitmore said. “Like a car with both doors open.”
Theo giggled so hard he fell over.
Max was across the room, cutting faces into new milk jugs. I’d run to the store and bought six gallons of milk. We were going to be drinking milk for a month.
I was making tombstones. Out of new cereal boxes. Max was dictating the jokes.
HERE LIES LES MOORE.
RIP JOEL’S DIET.
Mrs. Whitmore looked over at the tombstones. She watched me paint I TOLD YOU I WAS SICK on a box of Cheerios.
“Can I make one?” she asked.
I handed her a cereal box and a paintbrush.
She painted it slowly. Carefully. Her hand shook a little. When she was done, she held it up.
HERE LIES BERNARD WHITMORE.
HE NEVER LET ME WIN AT CRIBBAGE.
NOT ONCE IN 54 YEARS.
Max laughed so hard he dropped his milk jug.
We played Joel’s playlist. Creedence and the Monster Mash and that awful Ghostbusters song.
Mrs. Whitmore didn’t know any of the songs. She asked Max to play something from her day. He found Frank Sinatra on my phone. Witchcraft.
She sang along. Every word. Off-key and wobbly.
“Bernard used to sing this to me,” she said. “Every Halloween. While he carved the pumpkins. He had a terrible voice.”
“So did Joel,” I said. “He sang the Monster Mash every year. Every single verse. Even the ones nobody knows.”
“Bernard used to call me his little witch,” Mrs. Whitmore said. “Because I’d stand in the kitchen and stir the cider on the stove. He said I looked like I was making a potion.”
She looked down at the bedsheet in her lap. At the bald head and the enormous ears and the little red cap Theo had colored in with marker.
“I haven’t made cider since he died,” she said quietly.
Mrs. Whitmore washed the ghost with Joel’s glasses that night.
She took it home. Across the street. She washed it three times. With bleach. And a stain stick. And a toothbrush, she told me later, scrubbing at the shoe print until her fingers ached.
She brought it back the next morning at seven a.m.
I opened my front door in my bathrobe.
She was standing on my porch. In her gray coat. Holding the ghost, folded neatly, like a flag.
It was white again. Bright white. The mud was gone. The shoe print was gone.
And she’d redrawn Joel’s glasses. In fresh black Sharpie. Carefully. Exactly where Max had drawn them.
“I didn’t want them to fade,” she said. “When I bleached it. So I traced over them.”
I couldn’t speak.
“And I brought you something else,” she said.
She held out a mason jar. It was warm. Steam was coming off the top.
“Apple cider,” she said. “Bernard’s recipe. With cinnamon sticks and cloves and a little orange peel.” She swallowed. “I made it at five this morning. First time in eight years. I stood at the stove and stirred it and I swear to God I heard him singing Witchcraft in the living room.”
We hung the ghosts that afternoon. Saturday. All of us.
Five ghosts for Joel. Like always.
And one new one. For Bernard.
With a bald head and enormous ears and a little red flannel cap.
But we didn’t hang them from the porch rafters this time.
We hung them in the tree.
All six of them. In the lower branches of the red maple. Not on the front side, where they’d block the view. Around the edges. On the sides. Framing it. So that from across the street, from Mrs. Whitmore’s big front window, you could see the whole tree. Every red leaf. With six white ghosts dancing around the edges like they were holding hands in a circle.
Max figured it out. He stood in Mrs. Whitmore’s front room by her window and called out instructions on his phone while Theo and I climbed the ladder.
“Left. More left. No, your other left, Mom. There. Stop. Perfect.”
When we were done, Mrs. Whitmore stood at her window and looked out.
She didn’t say anything for a long time.
Then she came across the street.
She stood on my lawn and looked up at the tree.
“Bernard’s next to Joel,” she said quietly.
He was. Theo had insisted. The ghost with the bald head and the red cap was hanging right next to the ghost with the glasses. Their sheet-arms were tied together with a piece of orange yarn.
“They were friends,” Theo explained. “So they should hold hands.”
Mrs. Whitmore put her hand over her mouth.
She put her own decorations up that week.
She hadn’t decorated her house for Halloween since Bernard died. Eight years.
She dug through her attic and found Bernard’s old carving tools. In a wooden box with his initials burned into the lid. B.W.
She asked Max to help her carve a pumpkin.
They sat on her porch for three hours. Max held the pumpkin steady. Mrs. Whitmore held the tools. Her hands shook too much to carve the fine lines, so Max did those, with her guiding his hands.
When they were done, it was the Brewers logo. Perfect. The little ball and glove. The letters.
Max put a candle in it. They set it on the porch railing, right next to her white rocking chair.
People started driving by to see it.
On Halloween night, we did something we’d never done before.
We trick-or-treated together. All of us.
Max went as a mad scientist. Theo went as a ghost. A bedsheet with eyeholes. He said it was so he could match the tree.
I went as a witch. Mrs. Whitmore lent me a hat.
And Mrs. Whitmore went as a witch too.
She stood on her porch in a long black dress and a pointy hat with a stirring spoon in her hand. Next to Bernard’s Brewers pumpkin. Handing out full-size Snickers bars, because she said Bernard always said if you’re going to do Halloween, do it right.
She had a big pot of cider on a camp stove on her porch. She gave a cup to every parent who came by.
“My husband’s recipe,” she told every single one of them. “Bernard. He used to call me his little witch.”
At the end of the night, after the last trick-or-treater had gone home, the four of us sat on Mrs. Whitmore’s porch.
She was in her white rocking chair. I was in Bernard’s chair, which she’d brought out from the front room for the first time in eight years. The boys were sitting on the steps, sorting their candy.
Across the street, the red maple glowed.
Max had put battery tea lights inside all six ghosts. They lit up from the inside. Six soft white shapes floating in the dark among the red leaves. Holding hands.
“It’s beautiful,” Mrs. Whitmore said.
“It is,” I said.
She was quiet for a long time.
“I’m sorry, Laurel,” she said. “For everything. For what I said to your boys. For what I did. I don’t know what came over me.”
“Grief,” I said. “That’s what came over you.”
She nodded slowly.
“It makes you crazy,” she said. “Doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“It makes you hold onto things. Too tight. A tree. A view. A window. And then when somebody gets in the way, you…”
“You stomp on their ghosts,” I said.
She laughed. A small, sad laugh.
“You stomp on their ghosts,” she agreed.
“Can I tell you something?” I said.
“Of course.”
“When I hung those ghosts in the tree,” I said. “That afternoon. After you tore everything down. I wanted to hurt you.”
She looked at me.
“I wanted you to look out your window and feel what my boys felt,” I said. “Coming home and seeing everything they made in the gutter. I wanted you to feel that. I wanted you to scream.”
“I did scream.”
“I know.” I looked down at my hands. “I’m not proud of it. I could have called the police. I should have, probably. That would have been the grown-up thing. Instead, I did something petty.”
Mrs. Whitmore was quiet for a moment.
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