When the two of them decided to part, they agreed that it was silly not to stay on until the lease was up at the end of summer. Philip’s young daughter was visiting just then, and she was having a wonderful time. The house was three stories high—there was certainly room enough to avoid each other. He was being transferred to Germany by his firm in September. Kate planned to move to New York, and this way she could take her time looking for a place. Wadding newspaper to stuff into the urns for another summer, she had been shocked at how tightly she crushed it—as if by directing her energy into her hands she could fight back tears.
Today, ten years later, Kate was back at the house. Philip’s daughter, Monica, was eighteen now, and a friend of Monica’s was renting the house. Today was Monica’s engagement party. Kate sat in a lawn chair. The lawn was nicely mowed. The ugly urns were gone, and a fuchsia plant hung from the lamppost beside the back door. A fuzz of green spread over a part of the lawn plot that had been newly plowed for a garden. The big maple tree that encroached on the kitchen had grown huge; she wondered if any light could penetrate that room now.
She knew that the spike in the maple tree would still be there. It had been there, mysteriously in place, when they first moved in. She walked up to the tree and put her hand on it. It was rusted, but still the height to allow a person to get a foot up, so that he could pull himself up into the nearest overhead branches.
Before the party, Philip had sent Monica a note that Monica showed to Kate with a sneer. He said that he was not going to attend the celebration of a mistake; she was too young to marry, and he would have nothing to do with the event. Kate thought that his not being there had less to do with his daughter and more to do with Kate and him. Either he still loved her or else he hated her. She closed her hand around the spike in the tree.
“Climb up so I can look up your skirt,” her husband said.
And then he was surprised when she did.
Ignoring the finger she’d scraped on the bark pulling herself up, she stood on the first high branch and reached behind to tug her skirt free, laughing and letting the skirt drift away from her body. She went one branch higher, carefully, and leaned out to look down. She turned and leaned against a higher branch, facing him, and raised her skirt.
“O.K.,” he said, laughing, too. “Be careful.”
She realized that she had never looked down on him before—not out of a window, not in any situation she could think of. She was twelve or fifteen feet off the ground. She went one branch higher. She looked down again and saw him move closer to the tree, as quickly as a magnet. He was smaller.
“Birds used to peck birdseed from a seeded bell that dangled from there,” she said, pointing to the branch her husband could almost touch. “This tree used to be filled with birds in the morning. They were so loud that you could hear them over the bacon sputtering.”
“Come down,” he said.
She felt a little frightened when she saw how small his raised hand was. Her body felt light, and she held on tighter.
“Sweetheart,” he said.
A young man in a white jacket was coming toward her husband, carrying two drinks. “Whoa, up there!” he called. She smiled down. In a second, a little girl began to run toward the man. She was about two years old, and not steady on her feet where the lawn began to slope and the tree’s roots pushed out of the ground. The man quickly handed the drinks to her husband and turned to swoop up the child as she stumbled. Kate, braced for the child’s cry, exhaled when nothing happened.
“There used to be a tree house,” Kate said. “We hung paper lanterns from it when we had a party.”
“I know,” her husband said. He was still reaching up, a drink in each hand. The man standing with him frowned. He reclaimed his drink and began to edge away, talking to the little girl. Her husband put his drink on the grass.
“Up in the tree!” the little girl squealed. She turned to look over her shoulder.
“That’s right,” the man said. “Somebody’s up in the tree.”
The glass at her husband’s feet had tipped over.
“We didn’t,” Kate said. “I made it up.”
He said, “Shall I come up and get you?” He touched his hand to the spike. Or else she thought he did; she couldn’t lean far enough forward to see.
“You’re so nice to me,” she said.
He moved back and stretched up his arms.
