Momma calls for you from inside the house and you don’t move at all. Instead you wiggle a little on the tree branch, shifting your weight from one butt cheek to the other. Sitting up this high the weight of gravity is increased; your feet dangle heavily and you keep your arm around the heart of the tree to anchor yourself in place.

The downstairs window is open so you can hear everything inside the house. The way she’s calling makes it clear that she doesn’t yet know you are here, hiding in the backyard tree, instead of getting your things together for piano lessons. Momma’s voice moves from room to room as she collects her pocketbook, checks on all the kids, and looks for you.

Piano lessons. You want to puke. Fourth grade is plenty of time not yours, as far as you’re concerned. But the lessons happen to you every week, and practice every night. You have become a master at pretending to play the piano although nobody appreciates your talent because that is the whole point: to go unnoticed.

Momma yells something to your little brother, something about video games and going outside to play before his brains rot. If you’re lucky Momma might forget about you and your piano lesson. You could sit all day in the tree, even with the humidity like it is. Here in the tree the leaves breathe relief, the heat passes through the canopy with the stickiness all sucked out. And you’d be happy to sit here, even if it weren’t for the magic of the tree breathing. You wish Momma would leave you forgotten out here until you rot, like a video game brain. Not likely. Just when you begin to hope this ridiculous hope you hear your sister ratting you out.

“She’s up in the tree,” your little sister says. Although you can’t see her you know the face she is making when she says this. It’s a face of shame, perhaps looking at her shoes or hiding a nervous smile with the back of her hand. She doesn’t mean to get you in trouble, but she doesn’t want Momma to start getting frantic either. None of that makes you feel better toward her though, considering that you’ve been found out. Suddenly the lesson looms ahead, an inescapable fate, an endless hour of sitting in the tiny room with Miss Margaret and her smelly breath. Piano lessons make you want to take a long nap.

Momma comes out into the backyard and looks around. She’s got the car keys in one hand and she is jingling them uncertainly as she heads for the tree. You freeze; hold your breath. Maybe the leaves are so thick she won’t be able to see this high.

“Come on down,” Momma says. She sounds impatient. You have heard her calling you for at least 10 minutes now.

This is it. You’ll have to climb down. Your stomach does a flip-flop inside and you think about the hours you were supposed to be practicing a new piece for recital and didn’t. Instead you carefully wasted each minute of the nightly hour set aside as practice time. First you flipped through the book, rereading the titles of each song you don’t know. You took a pencil and colored all of the notes that were empty instead of filled in. Then, when Momma came by and asked when exactly you intended to start playing you gave a long sigh, at least five seconds worth of time, and began to play the one song you do know. It’s called “Ode to Morning” and you learned it when the lessons began. It’s not the piece you were assigned for this week, but Momma doesn’t know that. She smiled at the tune, nodded, and left you to play.

“I mean it. Let’s go!” Momma demands now, standing at the base of the tree. She’s looking up at you with her hands on her hips. Her face is turning red. From this angle her head looks disproportionately large on her shoulders and her feet are as small as a Barbie doll’s.

Your butt is truly numb. This tree limb is hard. You think of continuing to sit on the piano bench at Loftis Studio. You think of Miss Margaret and the scolding she’ll give you when you try to clunk out the notes in the piece you haven’t learned. She’ll point at the notes and when she does you’ll see the bright blue veins beneath the skin of her hand. You’ll study them like she wants you to study the stupid bubbles on the grid, the bubbles that are supposed to show you how music gets made. The veiny hands make more sense. They remind you of a cloudy day; shades of white cut across with rounded streaks of blue. When you finally have to play you’ll decipher each note with the code she gave you on the first day of lessons: Every Good Boy Does Fine. E; plunk the finger on the key; key strikes piano wire; note leaps from the wood case and hangs stringy in the air until you get the next note planned. You know it does not sound good, not like the music you hear the other kids play and definitely not like what you’ve heard on the stereo. You imagine the look Miss Margaret will give you. The look will say: “Nice try, but I have kindergarten students who play better than that.”

It’s this mixture of memory and imagining that gives you the guts to do the unthinkable. You stare hard at Momma, get a tighter grip on the tree, flex your feet, and shout.

“I’m not coming down!”

The words tumble from the tree and land hard on the ground, like living things.

“What?” she threatens.

You don’t repeat yourself. She heard. You can’t believe those words came out of your mouth and suddenly you feel panicked up here, treed like a squirrel.

She stares at you and you stare back, eyes as wide as they have ever been. You wonder if she’ll climb up after you, tear you from the limb, and force you into the car.

“I’m through playing with you,” Momma barks instead. “I’m going inside to straighten out your sister and brother before we go. When I come back out here you had better be in the car waiting for me.”

More than angry, she sounds irritable and tired. You don’t know what she does all day while you’re at school, but you imagine it’s easier than math quizzes. You resent her exhaustion despite the fact that she walks with a straight spine back into the house. You realize you have no idea what to do next but you do know one thing for sure. You are not going to piano lessons today.

You think you don’t want to go because it’s boring, but the truth of the matter is that you don’t want to go because it seems like it should be great and it isn’t. The truth of the matter is that last week Miss Margaret got fed up with you sidetracking her with silly questions about her life, her dog, her boyfriend. She leaned over from her chair, put her hand on your shoulder, and she asked what was really going on.

“Nothing,” you said, automatically breathing only through your mouth to combat her odor of stale coffee and corn chips.

“Then why don’t you ever want to play?” Miss Margaret had asked.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” was your only response. It was your failsafe to excuse yourself, the last resort you knew could only be used a few times before she’d see through.

Miss Margaret had made a puckered up face and shrugged while you flipped your legs over the piano bench and scooted on out to the bathroom. You took your sweet time. You sat on the toilet waiting for everything to air dry, then washed your hands twice with the pink gummy soap. You looked at yourself in the mirror and stuck out your tongue, wishing you could stick it out at Miss Margaret.

When you emerged from the bathroom you trudged back down the hall to the assigned room. Just outside the door you stopped and listened, peering into the room through its large Plexiglas window. Miss Margaret was playing. It wasn’t your piece. It was something you had never heard before; something sad and determined that made you think of a princess who refuses the prince. Miss Margaret played without sheet music. Her body moved as if she were dancing, her head tilted slightly as her hands pressed the keys with confidence and joy.

And in that instant you knew you would never be able to play like that. You knew you’d always feel trapped by the notes, have to struggle to decode, make each piece a clumping of sounds instead of the fluid melody somebody like Miss Margaret could play. You now know that you were afraid because you wanted to be that good, but didn’t believe you ever could be.

But today, hiding up in the tree, you don’t think about that. Instead you think of how much you’d rather sit in your room and read the book you just got from the library. The book is inviting with its glossy cover that pictures a young girl who looks out over a marsh. You’ve never actually seen a marsh. What surrounds your house is mostly concrete and people’s lawns. But the first chapter in the book was good and the girl in it reminds you of the adventures you would have if you lived somewhere interesting like a marsh instead of just living in a subdivided neighborhood.

As you imagine a marsh you study the underside of the branches above you. Those thicker branches look like the smooth, tan underside of a creature. Their haphazard greenery is so unlike the even green of a yard clipped and hedged and neat and square. You wish you had thought to grab the book before you came out here to climb the tree, but who would have thought you’d be stuck in the tree for the rest of your life?

Your chest thumps when Momma comes back outside. You can’t imagine what will happen next, only what will not.

What happens occurs despite your paralysis. Momma begins to reason.

“What in the world has gotten into you,” she begins. “We are going to be late. I already paid for this lesson and it was expensive.”

You scratch your forehead. Usually “expensive” is a reason why you can’t have something, not a reason why you should. You wonder why Momma has wasted your chance to have something expensive on piano lessons. Giving up on that mystery you just say: “Momma, I don’t want to go.”

“But why?” she asks, looking honestly bewildered.

“I just don’t.”

“Well,” Momma says, “it’s not a choice. Get out of that tree. Get into the car. We are going. Now.”

You realize she is wrong. You realize, suddenly, your power. Momma says yes, but you are saying no. You crunch your eyebrows in concentration over this novel experience. Your head swims a little as the paradigm shift unsettles you and you tighten your grip on the tree branch. And just like that the standoff is no longer about piano, but about you and your Momma, about winning the fight. You remember the Alamo. In school they taught you about all those guys, guys who fought to the death, unmovable heroes. You think about stepping over a line in the sand, committing yourself to battle, no matter the odds.

She mistakes your silence for wavering and jumps right to the final step of negotiations.

“I’m going to count to three,” she says. “One.”

You think of William Travis, of Jim Bowie, of Davy Crockett, and you stare her down.

“Two.” Momma draws out the ew sound menacingly, but you shake your head no.

“Three!”

A nervous giggle percolates in your gut, but you fiercely squash it down. This is where Momma would usually grab your arm and push you along to your room to think about what you’ve done. But she can’t. You are up in the tree and you doubt she’ll be climbing up here after you, especially in the dressy work clothes she has on.

“I’m going to get in the car,” Momma says calmly. “You had better be standing in the driveway by the time I back out of the garage.”

With that she turns and walks away. You realize this is your last chance to save your behind exactly when you realize that you aren’t going to do it. The garage door rumbles open and Momma starts the car. If you knew the cuss words you’ll learn in two more years you would use them all right now: shitfuckcocksuckermotherfuckergoddamntittiedickhead. You’re in for it now.

You sit up in the tree knowing you should be climbing down and heading for the car. You wonder if you’ll do it, give in, surrender, be good. You’ve always been good when it counted before and it feels sort of like you’re in someone else’s body now. Listening to the Chevy idling in the driveway, its gasoline fumes begin to find you in the treetop and that doesn’t help with your disorientation. You stop keeping time on your Mickey Mouse watch after five minutes tick by, and soon after that she shuts the car off, leaves it where it is, and returns to look up into the tree.

“I don’t understand you,” she says. Her voice is flat and the expression on her face is new. You don’t know it now, but soon that expression will be the one you see as often as any of the others she has. She’ll look at you with this new face on and off for the next fifteen years: mouth made small, eyes slitted and bright, arms folded over her stomach, snug under her breasts. Eventually you’ll realize it is a face of fearful disappointment. She’ll make this face when you decide it’s not satisfying to get A’s in school and start earning D’s and F’s. She’ll make it when you quit the volleyball team and won’t tell her why, and again when you return home after running away for three days without telling her where you’ve been. She’ll make this face when you state with defiance and arrogance that only morons are sure in the existence of God. You will regret the fact that this expression leaves wrinkles that remind you of scars in the flesh of her face, about her eyes and around her mouth. But that regret won’t happen for many years to come. Today what happens is that she turns her back on you and goes in the house, shutting the door quietly behind her.

You stay up in the tree through suppertime. Your muscles begin to ache and you are starving. The smell of spaghetti sauce enhances your hunger but even though you’ve climbed this tree a million times before, you suddenly don’t know how to climb down. When Daddy comes home you wish more than anything to tackle him and inhale the odors of stress that you will come to associate with “man.” But you stay in the tree and he doesn’t come out to scold you like you’ve feared he will, as if he knows that silence will press on you heavier than his words can.

As the sun goes down the mosquitoes buzz to life. They inject you with itch, leaving hard swollen mounds on the flesh of your ankles, your neck, and your arms. The dinnertime smells begin to fade and your hunger solidifies into a clump that lodges itself in your throat so that you can’t swallow and it feels funny to breathe. You wish you could turn the clump into tears you could shed, bleed it out and think of a way to get home. You want to cry because even if you don’t have the words to figure it out, you sense that something in life is now irrevocably changed.

It’s your little sister who eventually comes out to check on you. She grabs the low branch and hoists herself into the crux, her sneakers slipping on the smooth, worn trunk so that you think she might not make it. But she does. Then she scrambles up to sit on the branch just below you. When she settles at last her round little face is shiny with sweat. You feel relieved at her presence; it is assurance that despite the silence from the house you haven’t ceased to exist.

“Are you ever coming back inside,” she asks without preamble.

You think of Momma clutching Daddy’s arm as she explains what you’ve done. You imagine his stern expression as clearly as if he were in front of you right now: jaw locked, consoling arm about her shoulders, shaking his head as he plans what he’ll do when he gets a hold of you.

“I don’t know. What did Momma say?”

“Well,” your sister says, “first she told Daddy.”

“Then what?”

“And then,” she says, “they laughed.”

Her face is wide open as she says this, mirroring your bafflement.

“Laughed?”

“Yeah,” she says, swatting a mosquito from her arm. “Both of them. It’s too buggy out here. I’m going inside.”

As easily as that she reaches back down the tree with her foot, finds a hold, and swings from her perch.

You watch her go inside with envy. She is slim and small, and you think how easy life was when you were in first grade too. You wonder when life got complicated. You wish you were more grown up so it would get easier again.

The tree roaches begin to rustle in the leaves above your head and you imagine their shiny striped shells clicking like armor as they get closer and closer to your bare, dangling legs. And just like that you start to cry. The tears are hot against lids of your eyes and you cry without releasing the sobs that ache inside your ribs.

It’s dark in the backyard now, so when the patio light flashes on you blink a little against the shine. Momma comes out of the house without looking in your direction. She goes into the garage and comes out toting Daddy’s aluminum extension ladder. You’ve lifted the ladder before when he was letting you help as he cleaned out the gutters and you know how heavy it is, but Momma carries it across the yard like it’s easy.

She leans it against your branch, digging the legs into the soft dirt just enough to prevent a slide. She’s in pajamas now, and barefoot, and you suddenly realize that you’re not afraid. You imagine she’s come to rescue you, to pick you up from the branch and tuck you into her arms like a baby again, to shush your tears until you melt into warm sleep and she lays you back in the bed so smoothly you don’t even know it’s done until you wake up with the morning light. You find yourself longing for Momma’s touch so hard you want to tumble from the tree right into her, to give up being tough, to surrender back to where you and Momma were this morning before you ever thought of saying “no.”

The ladder shudders your branch as she climbs and it isn’t long before she’s looking up at you from inches away. She regards you silently and you wait for her to break the silence. When she doesn’t speak you begin feeling for the words to build a bridge across the new gap.

“Momma, I — ”

“Dinner is in the fridge,” she says. “You can make a plate for yourself if you’re hungry. We already ate without you.”

“But — ”

“Be sure to put your dishes in the wash when you’ve done.”

With that she smiles, a quick flash you can’t quite grab, and heads back down to the ground. When she gets to the bottom you expect her to take hold of the ladder and put it in the garage, but instead she peers back up into the tree.

“And don’t even think of getting into that bed before you brush your teeth,” she says. Without waiting for your response she dusts some dirt from her pajamas and pads back inside, bare feet and all.

You blink twice. You’ve never made your own dinner before and you wonder if Momma somehow forgot that fact. Of course, Momma never really forgets anything. You don’t know it tonight, but one day when you have a headstrong child of your own, Momma will remember to you that despite her anger, despite her disappointment, at this night’s standoff she was proud that you had become a person of your own.

Something unseen tickles the skin on your leg and you shiver out a squeak, slapping at it. You start the familiar path down the tree, crossing your ankles and preparing to drop below the branch and hang like a monkey for a minute before scootching down the trunk like your sister had done. But you don’t. You can’t say why, but you inch toward the ladder and rest your foot in the first rung, feeling the blood rush new in your limbs as you take pressure onto the balls of your feet.

You feel your way down the ladder, rung by rung, and when you reach the ground you think you finally understand why the sailors you read about are always kissing the sand when they get to new land. You start to dash inside to escape the bugs and the heat, but halfway there you stop, turn back, and contemplate the ladder.

With the ladder leaning against it your tree doesn’t look so big. Hating that thought, you go back and give the aluminum ladder a tug. It falls away from the tree, landing with a clatter in the grass.

Tonight you will put the ladder back where it belongs, laying up against the garage wall atop a layer of sawdust from Daddy’s last project. You will do this despite the fact that the ladder is heavy and cuts into your hands as you lug it back the way it came. The sight of it there will fill you with the feeling that you’ve done a job right, a job nobody told you to do. There is something wonderful in this thought, and something you wish you could perhaps give back.

Even though you will find yourself locked against Momma a million times in the years to come, there will never be another first refusal. Tonight you will not understand the significance of this newness but you will go back inside and scoop noodles and sauce into a bowl and eat your dinner cold. It’s a way you’ve never eaten it before, a way you decide you really like. You’ll creep up to bed with no kiss, thinking that you’ve won but somehow unable to rejoice in your victory because you are not sure just what has been lost in the fight. As if it’s a concession, and even though Momma’s not going to know, tonight you will choose to brush your teeth twice.