A storm blew the hackberry tree down in the night. Now it rests against the side of their neighbors’ house in a cradle of internet cables. It had fallen so silently that Jennifer didn’t hear it; even the neighbors didn’t hear it, apparently. Their porch light still glows. No stirring from within. Soon, someone in that house will look out their bedroom window and be greeted by branches and abandoned squirrel nests. 

“Is it bad that we don’t know their names after five years?” Jennifer asks Mark, her husband. 

“We know their names,” he says. “Peter and Willa, and their kids are Paul and Robbie. Their dogs are Reba and Cookie.” 

She isn’t sure if he’s making this up. Since he lost his job two months ago, he’s become strange and moody, playing guitar in the bedroom one weekend and not getting out of bed the next. If he can lie about being fired and forget to mention he can play guitar, maybe he’s making up names for the people and animals next door. 

They watch as the neighbor—allegedly named Peter—steps out onto his lawn. 

“If it wasn’t for those cables,” says Mark, “our tree would have crushed their house.” He sips his coffee calmly. 

“Jesus,” she says. 

It didn’t seem like that big of a storm, not like the tornado a decade ago that skirted over them before killing hundreds of people in Alabama. That’s something Jennifer hadn’t expected when she moved to Mississippi twenty years ago: tornadoes.

“But hey,” she says, “why is it our tree?”

“Because it’s on the edge of our property,” says Mark. “See? That’s our property.” He disappears out the door and she watches him stride across the yard and call out to the neighbor, a bald fifty-something man in khaki shorts and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt. Watches as they both stare at the tree, duck under the dangling cables, peer up at the neighbor’s house, pointing, nodding. 

The tree has broken off jaggedly at the stump. Their stump.

Jennifer puts on a Walmart sundress and goes outside, waving her arms. It’s late June, already hot at seven in the morning. “Socially distance!” she calls, trying to sound cheerful. They ignore her. It’s not so terrible, is it, that they don’t know their neighbors? It seems as if all the people on this street are dog people, people with children. On Sunday mornings, these people get dressed up and pile into their SUVs and drive off to one of the many churches in town. Or they used to, until this spring. Now she supposes they Zoom in from their living rooms. 

The neighbor turns to her. “I was just telling Mark I saw a big flash of lighting in the middle of the night. It reminded me of the monsoons in Tucson. That’s something I don’t miss. The streets would flood like you wouldn’t believe.” Oh, God, he’s a talker, and even though she actually did live in Tucson in the nineties and knows all about monsoons, she just says, “Yep,” and then he’s saying, “Well, you know all about that, from when you lived on Mabel Street.”

It’s like falling down a well. But there he is, beneath the layers of decades: Peter, good old Pete, whose last name she never actually knew because those things didn’t matter then. 

“Holy fucking shit,” she says. She would never curse like this in front of her church-going neighbor, but this is Peter, Pete! He sat on her front porch and cried about a girl who didn’t love him. She’d thought: He’s such a nerd, but he’ll meet somebody. And after she moved away, she never thought of him again. 

*

Her husband knows a tree guy. The tree guy is a friend from when Mark used to have a job writing news articles for the university’s agriculture department, before he got fired; the tree guy says he can come out later that afternoon and chainsaw the hackberry and turn it into pulp. He’ll bring a woodchipper. He has his own company now, he’s doing well. It’s dangerous work, but you make good money. 

“But isn’t it weird?” she says, when Mark won’t shut up about the tree guy. “That Pete ends up right next door? This person I sort of knew in Tucson twenty-five years ago? Right next door to us in Mississippi?”

“It’s not that weird,” he says. 

Even Peter, good old Pete, had not seemed sufficiently impressed. 

“You’ve known this for five years?” she said to him. “And never said anything?”

“I figured you recognized me,” he’d said. “How’ve you been?”

How’ve you been? You used to cry on my porch, you idiot, she wanted to say. I watched you vomit into my shrubbery. She said: “Remember going to the Buffet at six in the morning that time? And drinking Bloody Marys?”

“I don’t like Bloody Marys,” he said. “I probably had beer.”

“Well, maybe you had beer then!” she said. 

“I do remember going to the Buffet. And that guy. Nathan. Whatever happened to him? He was cool.”

Nathan was the guy she’d lived with, who she broke up with when he started snorting coke with his bandmates. He was not cool. He thought she and Pete were fucking and once he locked her out of the house and she broke a window and Nathan called the police on her and then she called the police on him. How strange that this had been her life once, and that this bald, pudgy stranger in front of her had witnessed some of it. 

“No idea,” she said, which was the truth. She has never joined Facebook. She doesn’t go to reunions. She doesn’t want to know if there are people from her past thinking about her, remembering things she doesn’t even remember about herself—or misremembering. 

Now she says to her husband: “We don’t have to make friends with him now, do we?”
“Of course not,” he says. “Why would we?”

Because, she wants to say, because Peter/Pete is like someone she invented for some purpose, and what if there’s still a purpose? She can’t even remember how they met, whose friend-of-a-friend he’d been. Had it been at a party? Or at Club Congress? And somehow he filled a necessary role in her life: the harmless male friend, someone who didn’t scold her for smoking too much, who had a girlfriend (sort of) back in some other state, someone who would sit on the porch with her and watch the Hale-Bopp comet hanging in the sky, someone who was up for whatever—they’d gone to a strip club! They had! She wonders if he remembers that. Those girls under the strobe lights, how funny and sad it all seemed. 

*

At a little past eight, Peter’s wife (Willa?) slams out the front door and stalks down her driveway, pausing to stare up at the tree resting against the house. Jennifer has waved at her when they both back out of the driveway at the same time; she’d once considered inviting her over for drinks but lost her nerve. What did she have in common with anybody anymore? Now, feeling foolish, she walks outside, waving. 

“Hello there!” Jennifer says. “Sorry about the tree. A tree guy is coming soon. We’re paying for it.”

“Oh, boy,” says Willa. She’s small and dark-haired, with wide nostrils and a square face: pretty in a weird-looking way. Her hair is tied up in a bouncy ponytail, and she’s wearing pink sweats. “That’s something all right.” 

Jennifer wonders if this is the girlfriend Peter had cried and vomited over on her porch: unlikely. She wonders if Peter has told her that they know each other, used to know each other. 

Willa is clicking her car unlocked.

“Did Peter tell you that it turns out we used to know each other?” Jennifer says. “In the nineties! In Arizona. Isn’t that crazy?”

“Huh!” says Willa. “Small world.” And she gets in her car, waves, and drives away.

*

The tree guy shows up in a white truck, hops out with a chainsaw. Another guy shows up in a red pickup, hauling a woodchipper on a trailer. While the tree guy slices through fallen branches, the other guy feeds everything into the woodchipper. It’s awfully loud and very impressive. Jennifer wishes she had a job that was so practical, where you could witness progress. Her job is teaching college students how to write paragraphs. When everything went online in March, she held classes via Webex and sometimes her students showed up and sometimes they didn’t. One girl shouted: “I’m here! I’m just driving my grandmother to the doctor!” Jennifer gave everyone As because she was tired. She has no idea if anyone learned to write a paragraph.

But this, oh this is wonderful: the fallen tree is already in pieces, like a child’s toy, like something you could stack up into a little cabin and pretend you live there, pretend there’s a hearth fire burning inside, and a little family eating dinner. And she watches from the living room window as the woodchipper guy feeds the branches into it like something from a fairy tale, an ogre devouring a village, teeth gnashing and bones grinding. It’s like watching crime and carnage and then destroying the evidence, gone forever. 

Mark goes outside and the tree guy stops chain sawing; they shake hands. Don’t shake hands! she wants to say. Everything is dangerous. Her mother, back in Maryland, hasn’t left the house in months. Her sister in Virginia already had the virus and called it “not that bad, and now I don’t have to worry about it.” 

When Mark comes back inside he says, “That other big hackberry by the carport should come down, too. It’s unstable.”

“Which other big hackberry?” 

They go outside. The tree is so big she’s never really noticed it. It towers over their house. If it fell one direction, it would kill them. If it fell the other direction, it would kill their neighbors. 

“It’ll cost about three grand to take it down,” Mark says. He doesn’t look worried, even though he should be. She thinks of their savings account, which is down to less than a thousand dollars. She thinks of their credit card bills. She thinks of Mark playing guitar in his bedroom instead of going to work. She thinks of saying un-take-backable things. 

“Maybe we should take our chances,” she says, and he walks off down the hall and shuts the door. After a moment she hears guitar, something folksy and familiar and annoying. 

She hadn’t realized they owned any trees, and it turns out they have (had) two. One of which nearly crushed their neighbors in their beds. Another of which could crush them. It’s not the tree’s fault, she wants to say. And then she feels a terrifying wave of tenderness for her husband and herself. 

When he comes out a half hour later, he says, gruffly, “It costs so much because they’ll need a crane.”

“I would like to see a crane,” she says.

*

Mark goes outside again and stands watching the tree guys chain sawing the fallen tree. She can tell that he wishes he could be a tree guy, do something tangible and necessary. The branches fall away from the cables. It’s meticulous work. The neighborhood is awake now, people walking their dogs, jogging, pausing to gawk. Pete/Peter comes out again, this time holding a cup of coffee. He says something to Mark and Mark says something back. What if he’s telling Mark things about her, things she doesn’t even remember about herself? Or things she wishes she didn’t remember? Nathan, the coke-snorting asshole. She’s never mentioned that person to Mark, what’s the point? 

Just to make sure Peter isn’t telling Mark anything he shouldn’t, she goes out again, into the hot sun. Until now, the only evidence Jennifer has that she ever lived in the desert was a shot glass somewhere with a cactus on it. Those years had been in-between-years, flailing about. A cocoon that turned me into an adult, she once told someone, though it was just a reason to get far away from her divorcing parents in Maryland. She found a temp job that led to another job that led her here, and of course to her husband. But it was like breadcrumbs that someone else had gobbled up, leaving no trace, no way back.

No trace except for this guy. Peter. Pete. She knows that Peter works in a lab at the university, unlike Pete, who worked as a waiter at Carlos Murphy’s. 

“You had that bike,” Peter says to her. To Mark he says: “She had a bike.” 

“Bikes are dangerous in this town,” she says, feeling defensive. “People drive like idiots.”

“And your jokes.” He grins at Mark. “She knew all the bar jokes.”

“Horse walks into a bar,” Jennifer obliges. “Bartender says, Why the long face?” She doesn’t mention that she’d told these jokes to him while he was crying on her porch.

“And you were always reading Charles Dickens. I remember that.”

Now he’s got her mixed up with her friend Lisa. She doesn’t correct him.

“Do you remember the strip club on Speedway?” she asks. 

“I don’t,” he says. “Did we go there? Was it fun?”

“It was,” she says, though it wasn’t.

It occurs to her that she could tell him almost anything, and he’d believe her. She wants to plant a false memory inside his head, like those psychologists did in the eighties to make kids think they’d been abused by Satanic cults. She wants him to remember that she was not just a bike-riding girl who told bad jokes to him while he was crying on her front porch—crying, she remembers now, not because of a girl, but because of something to do with his mother; she was sick. He had to go back to Tennessee for a funeral. But she doesn’t want to ask him about this or remind him. She remembers him saying, “This can’t be happening,” and her saying: “A priest, a monk, and a rabbit walk into a bar. Bartender says: Hey, I think you’re a typo!”

The nineties in Tucson: the smoke machine at Club Congress, dancing to Nine Inch Nails and Nirvana; it was the year of the Hale-Bopp comet, which seemed always to be hanging in the sky. She would walk home drunk and stare up at it and see two of them. There were always two of them. 

Remember that time, she could say now, when I rescued a family from a flooded underpass? Remember how, when I found out Nathan was seeing someone else, I left him immediately, instead of believing his bullshit? Remember how kind I was, how mature, how wise, how I said all the right things to you when you were heartbroken?

*

By noon, there’s a giant crane parked in their driveway. The fallen tree is almost gone, just a stump and a few branches left for the woodchipper guy. The tree guy and crane guy have turned their attention to the hackberry looming over the carport. 

Mark is inside, playing guitar and microwaving leftover spaghetti. Jennifer walks around the side of the house. It’s a bright, blue-skied day. Since the world shut down, she’s spent too much time staring at Flight Aware on her phone, wondering where people are going. Their house is in the path of a Southwest flight from Denver to Birmingham, and maybe that’s it now, slicing through the sky. 

Peter/Pete drove off with the kids before the crane showed up, and now they’re back. They slam out of the car with Arby’s bags. One of the boys runs into the house and the littler one stands in the driveway, looking at the stump where the fallen tree used to be. Looking at the tree guy harnessing up next to the giant hackberry. Looking at the crane.

“He loves trees,” Pete calls to her. He goes inside and leaves the kid standing there. 

Jennifer walks over to him, but not too close, and says, “We’re getting this big tree taken down. So it doesn’t fall on our house. Or on your house.”

The kid looks at her like she smacked him.

  “Trees have feelings,” the kid says. “They talk to each other. And to mushrooms.” Then he starts to cry.

There’s no good response. Because they do, don’t they? Studies show this? Their roots connect to other roots? There are underground channels and tunnels and nerve endings and they remember every rainy season and every hurricane and every time someone they love died. Is that what science says? Something like that? She believes it. So she can’t lie to the kid.

She says: “A mushroom walks into a bar.”

The boy wipes his nose.

“Bartender says, Go away, we don’t serve mushrooms. Mushroom says: Hey, I’m a fun guy!”

The boy blinks. The woodchipper has started up again, right at the punch line.

“A fun guy,” she shouts. “Hey, I’m a fungi,” and shouts again, until the kid smiles like he gets it.