“It won’t kill you, Jamal.” Mom says this matter-of-factly, like she just wormholed here from the future. Dad, wearing a flannel shirt for probably the first time ever, nods his agreement. The three of us made fun of him the entire ride here. Wait, are we buying trees or chopping them down, we joked. And we called him “Paul Bunion” until he blasted the radio to drown us out.

“I think only I get to say what’s gonna kill me or not,” I reply. “We need a bigger car. Or maybe we can plant five trees instead of, you know, twenty-five.”

“We’ll be fine. It’s a short drive to the preserve,” Dad says. He loads the last sapling into the back seat, its thin branches poking my forearm. “Besides, this is your Carpet Denim, Jamal. And now you have to leaf with the consequences.”

Mom and Dad exchange way-too-enthusiastic high fives, which quickly accelerates into a super involved and probably overly complicated routine complete with 360-degree spinning and shoe-tapping, culminating in a leaping, grunting chest bump—they’d been working on this for weeks in our living room, ever since they saw NBA players flash their own signature handshake exchanges during a game.

Yes, these are my parents. No, I don’t know why they’re like this.

“You’re killing it today, babe,” Mom says. “You’re on forest fire.”

Dad half frowns. “I don’t know if I can laugh at that.”

“Yeah,” Mom says, nodding. “That was highly insensitive.”

Dad rubs his chin. “Maybe if you’d said controlled forest fire.”

“Yeah, I wanted to be clever, but I got stumped.”

“Ohmigod, nice freaking recovery, babe!” Dad exclaims.

High-five routine round two.

“Did you get that on tape?” Dad asks me. “You got that, right?”

“Unfortunately,” I confirm.

A man parked next to us stops loading purple flowers into his red pickup truck, apparently so that he can laugh hysterically. He pumps his fist in a way I think is meant to encourage my parents to continue their semi-embarrassing-but-also-kinda-impressive routine; Dad calls these moments PDAs—public displays of awesome. Is that me groaning or you?

“Oh, man, you guys rock,” the purple-flower man declares.

“They’re for sale,” I tell the man. “What’s your best offer?”

Whit’s face pops out at me from between two small dogwoods; her arms sweep their foliage in either direction. I’d nearly forgotten she was in the back seat. “Jamal, I can’t believe you’re not into this! You’re one of the sappiest people I know!”

Mom’s and Dad’s faces light up like a holiday window display. “Oh snap,” Dad says. “Welcome aboard the Awful Joke Train, favorite daughter!”

“Thanks for having me, Dad,” Whit says. She lets the trees go and they smack her in the face. “Oww!”

And okay, I can’t resist. “Guess a dogwood’s bark is worse than its bite.”