I don’t know if I spent so much time with trees because I loved them or because of how much he loved me loving them, and I cannot separate these things. When I was maybe six, and he still sometimes lived with us, I’d come home at the end of a day in the woods, barefoot and filthy. Once he sat me on the washing machine, turning on the tub next to it, and washed my feet. He lathered up the soap and gave them a vigorous scrub, even using a nail brush on my heels, where dirt was embedded deep in the calluses.

“There’s copperheads in those woods, Libby—you have to wear sneakers. You can’t keep going around barefoot.” Jagged scabs scored my shins from climbing trees and crawling under laurel and rhododendron thickets.

He took my hand and pulled my finger across the ridge of a particularly bumpy scab.

“See that? You’re already turning into a tree. Your legs are becoming bark.”

The furrowed scab was raised and dark. I traced it with my fingers and ran my hand up both my shins, feeling the crusts.

“I think I am,” I said. I looked up at him, happy, and he laughed and towel-dried my feet and shins, even between the toes, and then slipped socks over my clean feet.

“Now you can go up to Her Ladyship and not be in trouble. And keep your feet clean.” But I knew he loved my black feet.

He had picked a book for each of us that last Christmas. Even now I think of him in that bookstore in New York City, selecting the books we would like, choosing our cards, deciding on the paper, then wrapping the gifts: folding, tearing tape, and tying ribbons with his thick fingers, more conditioned to working machines or hauling cinder blocks. For Marie, he had bought the two-volume set Rock On: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock n’ Roll, the Modern Years. I’d lost hours looking through the pictures. It covered 1964 to 1978 and pretty much all my favorite bands. Thomas got The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Space, which he kept in its original wrapping paper and wouldn’t let us touch. Ellen’s book was on art history and came with a watercolor set and brushes; for Beatrice he’d bought a book on breeds of dogs, with stickers. I wondered now if he’d told the person at the cash register they were for his children. I imagined him with his bag of presents on the subway back to the Bronx, sitting among the other Christmas shoppers, and there in the car I suddenly felt like I couldn’t breathe. I wished I could tell him how each book had become a cipher for us, how we couldn’t lose the picture he had of us or stop trying to fill it.