They disliked each other from the first week. Thirty one years of forced smiles, of one of them finding a reason to leave early, of my mother never once calling my husband son. Curtis told me he would rather work a Christmas shift than sit at her table again. When I asked, they both gave me the same line about coming from different worlds, and I decided it was money, because Eleanor had built a business and Curtis had grown up with nothing. Then one evening after a bad argument I heard her hiss that he knew exactly what he had done, and he said nothing at all, and after a few years I stopped asking.

She died at eighty one. At the funeral Curtis slipped out of the reception, and I found him alone beside the coffin telling her he had kept their secret, that nobody ever found out, that it would stay buried under the red maple in her yard forever. She had planted that tree thirty one years earlier and guarded it like a child. No landscapers. No moving it when the roots split the walkway. She once nearly shouted at my daughter for digging near the trunk with a toy shovel.