Jubilee July's Arc

Chapter 5 of 7

Jubilee walked from her friend's house with one conditional yes and a problem she had not expected. Her friend's words stayed with her on the road. No one wanted to be the second person under the tree with only Jubilee waiting. She had been thinking about the people. She had not been thinking about the place. She turned off the road and went to the maple tree to look at it the way a friend arriving for the first time in years would look at it. The tree itself still stood tall, leaves full, a squirrel working a branch and a small nest tucked near the fork. But the ground around the trunk had gone wild. Tall grass and weeds rose to her waist in a thick tangle. Burrs caught her sleeves. The flat patch where they used to lay blankets was gone under green. No one would drive an hour to sit in that. No one would say yes to a photograph of that. The tree was ready. The clearing was not. She drove into town and spent the afternoon making calls. She rented a brush mower from the hardware store for two days. She asked the lumberyard what a small open shelter would cost in kit form, delivered, raised by their crew before the weekend. The number was more than she wanted to spend. She paid it. She picked red beams from the sample board because red was the color of the ribbon in her hair and the color of the cake someone's mother had once carried out under the leaves. For a day and a half she cut down the overgrowth in strips, raked it into piles, and hauled it to the edge of the field. The crew came the second morning and set the posts. By evening the shelter stood beside the maple, four red beams, a peaked roof, two long benches under a plank table. Jubilee laid a red and white checked blanket across the table and set her woven basket in the middle. She stepped back to the road and looked at the spot the way a stranger would. A tree. A shelter. A table set. A place that expected people. She took a photo on her phone and sent it to the friend who had said yes. She wrote one line under it. Come see what I built for us. The reply came within the hour. Her friend would drive out the next afternoon to see it in person before deciding whether the conditional yes could hold any longer than that. Jubilee put the phone in her pocket. She had bought the place back from the weeds. She had not yet bought back the promise.