Free The Sweet Gum Tree by Katherine Allred

stump lying beside a huge gaping hole, roots exposed like skeletal arms unearthed from the grave. The rain fell in a fine mist now, and in the west the sun was already breaking through the clouds.
    I stood there, frozen with shock, as Mama’s car peeled into the driveway on two wheels, followed hard by the Judge’s truck, then Aunt Darla’s sedan. I was passed around and hugged and fussed over until neighbors started to arrive and everyone went to check out the damage. The general consensus was that we were lucky the tornado had never reached the ground. It had only hovered in the air above the farm before being sucked back into the clouds.
    Someone noticed I was shaking and a blanket was located and draped around my shoulders. Bobby Donovan, a local contractor and our nearest neighbor, had been one of the first on the scene. He was busily writing up repair estimates, conferring occasionally with Pete Townsend, our insurance agent, until they reached a mutually satisfying dollar amount, and Pete wrote the Judge a check. The repair work would start first thing in the morning.
    But no amount of repair was going to fix the hollow feeling inside me. Something was desperately wrong for Nick to abandon me the way he had, and I was afraid of what he’d say the next time I saw him. I didn’t know it would be two weeks before he set foot on the farm again, or that he’d ignore me so completely when he finally did. It was as though I’d ceased to exist for him, and nothing in my life had ever hurt me as much as that did.
    42

    The Sweet Gum Tree
    June faded into the hottest July on record. The windows in the house were replaced, the roof reshingled, and new carpets were put down to replace the water-soaked ones.
    The hole where the sweet gum tree had been was filled in and smoothed over, and grass was already growing over the scar. The Judge even made me a new swing in another tree, but it was never the same and I only used it enough to keep from hurting his feelings.
    Nick started using his room in the barn again, but he waited until all the lights were out in the house before he’d show up. The first time I slipped out to talk to him I found the door locked, and he wouldn’t answer me when I called to him.
    It was right after that painful discovery when I began keeping a journal.
    Somewhere in my mind, I thought that if I got the entire thing down on paper, maybe I could figure out what I’d done wrong and fix it so Nick would talk to me again. But I’d filled half the leather-bound notebook and was no closer to understanding than I’d been when I started.
    I was miserable. My whole world had been turned upside down and a huge chunk torn out of it. Weepy and depressed, I pushed my hair behind my ear and stared down at the journal pages lying on the kitchen table.
    “I bought some of those cookies you like,” my mother said. She was standing at the kitchen sink, hands buried in suds as she washed the lunch dishes.
    “I’m not hungry.”
    “You’re never hungry anymore. If you don’t start eating, you’ll dry up and blow away.”
    I could feel her gaze on me when I didn’t answer.
    “Did you and Nick have a fight?”
    “No.”
    “Then what’s going on? He never comes to the house anymore, and you’re acting like someone kicked your favorite cat.”
    “I don’t know, Mama. Why don’t you ask Nick?” And if she got an answer, I hoped she’d share it with me. I glanced out the back door in time to see him disappear into the shed. Every part of me surged with the longing to join him, make him talk to me, but I knew at the first sight of me he’d leave. The only time he tolerated my presence in the shed these days was when the Judge was helping him, and even then he acted like I wasn’t there.
    “I’m going to my room.” I closed the journal and went upstairs, determined not to cry again. It would only make Mama give me the third degree and there was nothing I could tell her.
    And so it continued for the