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"Just let et your chance, don’t you worry But you can sit out there and stew for the night" Her slippers slide across the ood plank floor as she shuffles back to take her seat

"They know you don’t have a phone to call the police," Iin my purse in Aoes back to rocking and sewing, as if she can’t hear the heavy footfalls back and forth across the front porch

"How long do you think they’ll stay out there for?"

She doesn’t estures with a nod up at a picture above the old piano in the corner A boy of maybe nine stands in the center of the barn, his cowboy hat on, a long stick in his hand and his shoulders pulled back Dark eyes pierce the person behind the camera "That’s Gabe, there" She chuckles "After Earl attackeddown to see the horses fora good three years Being in that barn was too hard

"Every day, Gabe would track down my father and ask him when I’d be back He didn’t understand at the ti hiuess Gabe ine because I didn’t tell anyone anything I refused to talk to a soul about it I guess they just started , my father ca up and down the center of the aisle When he asked hiuys That was in June, just after school let out, and every single day for that su down to the barn again Iaround the horses I couldn’t breathe, those first few steps inside bringing the demons with them But then I saw the path Gabe had worn into the floor If you look hard enough today, you’ll still see it" She turns her focus back to her quilt "I don’t think Gabe could be anything other than what he is"

She flips the quilt around on her lap and reaches for her signature black tree, already cut out and ready to be stitched on

"Why the tree?"

She doesn’t answer right away, her focus on positioning and pinning it in place, and I finally assu me

"It was one of the first days of eather after an unusually cold winter I was fifteen, and I decided I’d pull o for a ride down the road before dinner Just to the other end of our fields It’d be too dark if I waited until after" She switches out the red thread on her needle for black "I didn’t think anything of it when I saw Earl’s truck pull over on the side of the road ahead ofof it when he told me that he had found the perfect tree to clihter toto Ginny reveal tosoul

"When I realized what he wanted--what he thought I wanted--and I tried to runhe got really mad Irrationally so Turns out he wasn’t such a kind, nice man, after all He had a very dark side" She pauses "It wasn’t until he was about halfway through that I noticed the big white oak tree watching over us So I started focusing on that, instead On its height, and its bare branches Pretending that I was just lying in the grass on any regular spring day, and that if I watched closely enough, I’d get to see it wake up; I’d see the leaf buds sprout" She shifts a pin out of the way of her needle "It made it easier to deal with"

"What happened to Earl?"

Her nostrils flare with a deep inhale "He just stood for the longest ti, a dazed look on his face Then I watched hi I wasn’t in any shape to pick myself up and run But he didn’t leave He reached into the back of his truck," Ginnyshivers down oner He was going to killtree He walked past an cli the tree, all the way up to the first branch And then I watched hi himself from it" Her mouth crests doard in a frown "He was an unstable fellow History of mental illness Of course, uess when Earl’s own demons went to sleep and he realized what he had just done to ot the better of hioes on "When ti dark,for me He found my bike and the truck on the side of road It wasn’t hard to spot a two-hundred-and-forty-pound body swinging fro under that tree

"I guess you could say I lucked out There was a very brief police investigation I refused to give theured they didn’t need more than what they had between the body and my medical report from the doctors There was no point Earl was dead They couldn’t punish hi about the entire situation is that the great big tree--that gave ed me--never did bud any leaves that year Or any other year It just up and died White oaks aren’t coon anyway, so the fact that it was even growing out here was so And then to just die like that? Unheard of"

I say nothing

"I never forgot that tree When I had trouble falling asleep because I couldn’t shake theoak"

"And then you startedquilts with it"

She nods "I found out that winter that my daddy took a chainsaw to it, cut it down That was his way of dealing with the memory But I wanted to keep it alive, to payhts after I only ever ely therapeutic"

I take in the tidy stacks of boxes lining the far wall, three high and stretching the entire length of the wall, identified with color names scrawled across the front All filled with material for her quilts Hundreds ive it any leaves?"

Her hands stop and she looks up at me with a baffled expression "Because it is a dead tree, Water It will always be bare It’ll never be that oak that grows big and beautiful and changes colors in the fall, ever again Not in this life, anyway"

I nod slowly "Right" Is Ginny really talking about the tree any about herself? Is she the lone tree that died that day, and noatches the world fro is, Ginny’s not dead, far from it She’s just been afraid

"I think the buds are there You just need to look harder to see the but hesitates, as if changing her et soy to deal with them tomorrow"

"Or I could just hide out in here forever," I say, half-jokingly, my eyes on the black bars that protect me from the outside

"You will not" Ginny’s stubborn jaw sets "I won’t allow that You’ll find out what that boy knows and then you’ll decide what you want to do"

"What if I don’t want to know?"