I’m sticking my work gloves into the cracks of the sugar maple tree and pulling off pieces of bark and snapping twigs from the branches and collecting it all in an extra sap bucket.
“I don’t have any poster board or anything to put it on,” I say.
Grandpa starts walking to the shed and waves me along. “Let’s see if we can’t find something in here.”
Our shed is a mess. Grandpa’s workbench is covered with tools and old car parts and bottles of oil. Spare tires are stacked in the corner, and my baseball bats are sticking up out of them.
Grandpa’s digging through an old metal shelf and I’m thinking there’s no way he’s going to find anything in this place when he holds up an old green Vermont license plate like the ones on our truck. “How about this?”
I’m thinking he must have forgotten what he was looking for, because how can I use a license plate as poster board for my family tree? But then he says, “We’ll need some Gorilla Glue too,” and starts digging through his toolbox. “Aha! Here it is.”
We bring everything back inside and lay it all out on the kitchen table. “Let’s make that tree,” Grandpa says.
So I turn the license plate the tall way and start laying the bark out on it for the trunk and then add the twigs for the branches. They stick out off the sides of the license plate.
It doesn’t look like a perfect sugar maple or anything, but it’s way better than the stupid lines in my notebook. Grandpa’s turning over the bark, squeezing Gorilla Glue, then I press the bark hard into the license plate and Grandpa presses his hands down on mine to make the glue stick. “This should strike . . .” he says, but he shakes his head and presses harder down on my hands.
And it does. It does stick just fine. So we glue each piece and all the twigs pressing hand over hand over hand over hand until there’s a miniature sugar maple glued on the old Vermont license plate. And even though this project is stupid and I don’t like artsy things that much at all, it looks pretty OK since I like cars and maple trees.
“Look at that, Robbie!” Grandpa admires, pointing at the project.
But I know it’s not done. I still have the hard part left to do. I still have to put on the names.
I push my notebook toward him and say, “This is what I have so far.”
Grandpa looks at my draft and runs his finger over Eddie’s name. And then over Lucy’s name. Then he laughs at “mean old lady” and “mean old man.”
“They were kind of mean,” he chuckles. “But Lucy. Lucy was a gem. Just not so strong as Eddie and you.” But then he gets all quiet again just when I was thinking he was going to tell me more. But he closes up tight instead, and I can tell he’s not going to say any more than that.
“Forget it,” I say. “I don’t want to put any of them on my tree because I don’t know a thing about them.” Heat rises up to my face. “I can’t just hand in a stupid piece of bark.” I push my notebook clear off the kitchen table.
“Robbie,” he says.
And even though I feel bad that I trudged him through the stupid snow this morning, I’m mad he won’t actually help me with my family tree. So I say forget it, I’m going outside to collect the sap from the buckets and I don’t need his help.
“Robbie—” he says.
“Forget it, Grandpa!” I yell. “Forget it. Just keep everything inside and to yourself until you don’t remember anything anymore.” And what I’m thinking is that Grandpa needs Group Guidance with Ms. Gloria to teach him how to tap deep through his hard bark and open up.
The door slams behind me and the cold air feels good. I take my time emptying the buckets and packing the snow back up around the plastic collection jugs, but I can’t stay out very long because I rushed out mad without my jacket and I’m starting to shiver again like this morning.
When I go back inside, Grandpa’s coming down the stairs. “Sit,” he says and points to the kitchen table.
“I’m not doing the proj—”
“I said sit.”
I slump hard in the chair, but I grab my Dodgers hat out of my book bag and pull it down over my face.
Grandpa sits down too and before I know it he’s sliding a picture across the table. I can’t see anything past the brim of my hat, just this picture of a woman with a boy-short haircut, skin the color of sugar maple bark, and a big pregnant belly. In the picture my grandpa’s got his arm around her and he’s smiling big. He looks a lot younger and like he’s not confused about anything at all. Like he knows exactly where his flannel is and where the bathroom is when he gets up in the middle of the night to use it.
Then Grandpa taps his finger on the woman. “That’s your mom,” he tells me. “That’s Eddie.”
“Where were you keeping this? Why didn’t you ever show—”
“It’s here now.”
I don’t want to be mad at Grandpa, but I am. He had a picture this whole time and who knows if he has any more and who knows all the things about my mom he’s keeping from me?
And I think of Ms. Gloria telling me to use the family tree project to help me talk to Grandpa. It hasn’t worked that well so far, but it has to work today. It has to work today because I can’t wait anymore and I don’t know when Grandpa will go live with the old people at Mountain View, and because my family tree is due tomorrow.
“I need to know more for this project,” I say. He nods. “When we were in the woods this morning, you kept calling me Eddie,” I remind him. “You said you had to get to the hospital.”
I look up at him from under the brim of my hat.
“I did?” he asks. “I don’t remember—I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, Grandpa. It was the most you ever told me about her.” I look down at the picture on the table and turn my hat around backward so he can look right at me. “What happened?” I ask. “Tell me before you forget.”
Grandpa takes a deep breath and slides the picture back in front of him. “I don’t think I’ll ever forget. She lives here too,” he says and taps his chest. “Right next to you.”
I pat his hand and say that it’s OK, he can tell me. He holds the picture between his thumb and forefinger and it shakes a little as he looks.
“She came to Vermont to give birth and raise you here,” he starts. “Her mom, Lucy, had passed away from a heart attack. Eddie wanted you to have a relationship with me, a relationship that she didn’t really get since Lucy and I never lived together after she found out she was pregnant with your mom.”
He puts the picture down and traces her belly with his finger. “I loved her so much,” he says. “I made her healthy food for the baby and built her a crib out in the shed from real Vermont wood.”
I pictured Grandpa sanding the wood in the shed and hammering the pieces together tight.
He’s still looking down at the picture. “It was a hard labor, but she was the happiest in her whole life when you were born. She hadn’t named you yet when we brought you home. We called you ‘little fighter’ because . . .”
Grandpa is losing his words, but I don’t know the end to this sentence, so he needs to finish it.
“Why’d you call me ‘little fighter’?” I ask.
He nods and taps his finger on the table. “Little fighter . . . because you were small,” he continues, “and strong and you balled your fists up tight and made your voice heard all through the night right from the beginning.”
I try to picture my mom walking around our house with me in her arms as I cried out at the top of my lungs, and even imagining it makes me feel good.
“Your second and third day home from the hospital she ran a fever. Sweated through her sheets. The doctors had said it might take a few weeks for your mom to feel strong again, so I didn’t worry. I thought if the fever didn’t go down after another night I’d take her in to get checked the next morning.”
Then this morning in the woods all makes sense. Grandpa shoving the pack deep in his coat like it was a little fighter baby he was trying to keep warm, and pulling me through the woods telling Eddie to hold on, not to leave him. He was reliving that moment, trying to get my mom back to the hospital in time.
“The next day she was way worse, wasn’t she, Grandpa?” I pat his hand and take the picture from him.
“It was too late,” he says. “An infection had dug too deep. And I didn’t even . . .”
Grandpa puts his head in his hands and his shoulders are shaking and I know how he feels. Like it’s his fault.
“It’s no one’s fault,” I tell him, and for the first time I believe that. It’s not my fault my mom died, and it’s not his either. It’s just plain old unfair bad luck, like Alex’s dad and Ms. Gloria’s son. Grandpa grabs my hand and squeezes it hard.
“What happened after she died?” I asked.
Grandpa’s looking up at the ceiling like he’s remembering. “We buried her in a field of sunflowers in New Hampshire. Next to her mom. Next to Lucy.”
“I was there?”
Grandpa nods. “I held you the whole time. You balled your fists and cried. Then I brought you home and gave you the strongest fighter name I knew.”
“Robinson Hart,” I say.
“Robinson Hart.”
I’m thinking about the big question mark I have on my family tree. “Did she ever talk about my dad?”
“Your dad?” Grandpa repeats. “Eddie never once talked about your dad, and I just let her be on that.” Then he kind of smiles a little while he’s remembering. “Eddie wanted a child more than anything.” He smiles a little more and I can picture my mom with her big smile and sticking-up boy-cut hair. “You were all Eddie’s,” he says.
I laugh with him a little because it feels good to laugh. “Now I’m all yours,” I say, and he taps his big finger on his heart.
“All mine.”
Then I pick up my notebook from the floor and slide over the maple tree license plate. “I think I’m ready to finish the project.”