The Tomorrow Tree

Chapter One

I’ll meet you at the Tomorrow Tree.” Tina whispered the words she had said too many times to remember as a child. She glanced over at the artificial tree sitting on the passenger seat. It was only a foot tall, and she’d bought it at a thrift store in her leaner years.

“You’ve been so good to me that I won’t desert you, but I’m going to see the original tree, the one where my best and favorite memories came from.

And maybe I’ll even work up enough nerve to knock on the door of the house across the street.

” She reached over and touched one of the limbs of the fake oak tree.

“I was sitting on a limb like this, only much bigger, when I fell and broke my arm. Cleo took care of me until it healed.”

Closing her eyes and telling that little foot-tall tree stories about her past had brought her comfort during the turbulent times of the last decade.

“I’m here and nothing has changed.” She came to a stop at the entrance of the park where the ancient tree stood in the center—keeping watch on generations of children who came to play there.

The wooden sign above the archway leading into Benson Memorial Park had faded since she’d left, and the merry-go-round needed a fresh coat of paint. Tina got out of the vehicle, grabbed the little tree, and marched over to the huge one, which was quite an anomaly growing in West Texas.

“Memory Tree, meet Tomorrow Tree,” she said as she set the smaller version of the larger tree on the ground and wrapped her arms around the trunk.

She hugged it tightly before she climbed up to the first fork.

She ignored the sweat dripping from her cheeks onto her T-shirt and felt the first true peace she had known since she drove out of Benson toward South Louisiana thirteen years ago.

As a child, sitting on the low branches of the oak was like sitting on top of the universe.

Back then she had been innocent of all the heartache that adulthood brought into a person’s life.

All that had mattered was that she and her two friends, Walker and Gracie, got to play in the park each afternoon with Mae and Cleo.

“Is it time to go to the Tomorrow Tree?” they begged every afternoon when they got up from their naps.

That was where it got its name, and it became more than a tree they got to play around.

It grew into something of a living spirit that listened to her joys and heartaches without passing judgment.

When they were old enough to go to kindergarten, they rode the school bus back to Mae and Cleo’s house.

Cookies and icy-cold milk waited for them every single day, and then they were allowed to go to the park.

By the time they were teenagers and began to get into trouble, she, Walker, and Gracie would meet up at the tree to laugh about the escapades they had avoided punishment for, and moan about the ones they had not.

A distinct memory flashed through her mind about the time the three of them let all the air out of Sabrina’s tires at Cletus Williams’s farm after a party on a Saturday night as payback for Sabrina spreading rumors about Tina on Facebook.

“Then there was the time that witch and her minions, Faith and Reesa, blamed me for driving Cletus’s tractor into his farm’s pond,” she whispered.

“I had to work on his place for minimum wage that summer to make up the money to pay for the damages.” Tina sighed and brushed away tears as she stared at the two-story house across the street.

She visualized Mae and Cleo sitting in the two rocking chairs like they had every afternoon while the three children they took care of ran off energy in the park.

“I’ve missed you, my faithful old tree, but Mae and Cleo, even more so.

I hope they are both still living and as sassy as ever. ”

She gasped and tried to hide behind the leaves when she saw Cleo Butler come out the front door. It did not work.

Cleo marched down the porch steps and straight across the street. Other than a few splotches of gray in her short-cropped black hair, there was no mistaking the tall, lanky Black woman. She didn’t stop or smile until she reached the base of the tree.

“Sweet Jesus! Tina, that really is you? Come down out of that tree. Who do you think you are? Zacchaeus from the Bible? Well, girl. Jesus ain’t comin’ this way today, and you might fall and break more than your arm like you did when you was a kid,” Cleo fussed.

Tina scrambled down to the ground. “Hello, Cleo. How have you been?”

“I’m better, now that you are out of that tree. You ain’t changed a bit, except you got thinner, but we’ll get that meat back on your bones now that you are right here where you belong,” Cleo snapped and opened her arms.

Tina walked into them and wasn’t even surprised when a sense of peace swept her again.

“Why didn’t you tell us you were coming home? Get your car and park it in the driveway and get yourself out of this miserable heat. If hell is seven times hotter than this, I don’t want to go.”

“Then you better be praying,” Tina said through tears she refused to let fall. She had not expected a welcoming hug, or even permission to enter the house. Not after she had ghosted everyone in Benson for the past decade.

“Don’t you be sassin’ me the first rattle out of the bucket, or I won’t let you come over here to your precious tree for a week,” Cleo fired back.

Tina remembered hearing that Cleo had been married to a man who was mean to her and had cheated on her.

She’d divorced him and moved in with her best friend, Mae, long before Tina was born.

But Tina often wondered if the man was downright stupid.

No one even argued with Cleo without getting “the look.” Tina couldn’t imagine doing something like her husband had done.

“You can park behind my old pickup truck. Mae is going to be so glad to see you, and I’ve made cookies for the after-school snack.” Cleo whipped around and crossed the street to the only two-story house in Benson, Texas.

“After school?” Tina muttered. When Cleo didn’t answer, she wondered whether the old girl’s hearing had gone bad over the past years.

Hot wind rustled the leaves on the old tree and stirred up dust devils as Tina walked back to the SUV that had all her belongings crammed into every nook.

She could smell rain every time she inhaled, but that didn’t mean Benson would see a drop of it.

More likely than not, the wind would blow the clouds off to the northeast without giving the soil around town even a taste of water.

“Honey, just because you ain’t been around don’t mean that cookies won’t be ready when school lets out.” Cleo’s tone didn’t leave room for argument.

“Are y’all still babysitting children?”

“Don’t you be worryin’ none about what me and Mae do.

Just get yourself on in the house and out of this heat.

It’s way too early for summer, but I guess someone forgot to tell the weatherman.

Or maybe they did but God laughed at him.

This summer is going to be a scorchin’ one. I can feel it in my bones.”

Tina picked up her small tree and set it on the passenger seat of her vehicle.

She didn’t even bother to turn on the air-conditioning as she slid in behind the wheel.

She only had to back out of the parking lot and drive across the street.

When she’d made the decision to start all over in a new place, she’d been glad that her SUV was paid off and had enough room to hold everything she needed to pack inside it.

Cleo threw the front door open, motioned her inside, and fussed the whole time Tina crossed the yard. “You take off your shoes and leave them on the rug. I just waxed this hardwood, and I ain’t intendin’ for you kids to be tracking dirt through it.”

A rush of wonderfully cool air rushed out to meet Tina when she stepped inside the house and stopped in the wide foyer. “I’m not a kid anymore, Cleo.”

“Y’all will always be kids to us.” Mae Baker came out from the kitchen and wrapped her up in a fierce hug. “You are home at last. We’ve been waiting and waiting for this day to come around.”

Tina bit back tears and inhaled deeply. Mae still smelled like a mixture of coconut and black coffee. She promised herself that she would never go so long again without getting in touch with them.

She could stay an hour—maybe two—before she got back on the road for another long day of driving.

She hoped to be in Santa Rosa, New Mexico, on Monday and then on to her parents’ place in Northern California in a couple of days.

They hadn’t been too keen on seeing her when she’d called, so she didn’t expect to get as warm of a welcome from them as the one Cleo and Mae gave her, but hopefully, she would only be there a few days.

Just long enough to find a job and an apartment, she thought as she followed the two old ladies from the foyer.

Everything in Tina’s topsy-turvy life had changed, but not Cleo, who was tall though she still only came up to Tina’s shoulder.

Nor Mae, who still claimed she was five feet tall with her shoes on.

She always said that she was fluffy like a round little sheep.

Every step she took behind them seemed to melt away years.

“What are you doing back in Benson, and why didn’t you call us?

Let me look at you.” Mae turned around when they reached the kitchen and eyed Tina from her toes to the top of her five-foot-eleven-inch frame.

“You are too thin, but between me and Cleo and some good cooking, we can fix that in a month’s time. ”

I’m glad to see that the tree is still solid, but I’m really glad that Mae and Cleo are still here, Tina thought.

“Now, answer me. What brings you back to Benson?” Mae asked a second time.

“Just passing through,” she said.

“To go where?” Cleo asked.