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We got the tree when I was eleven, a tiny fir in a black plastic planter. Every year Jake and I would haul it inside after Thanksgiving and dress it up, and when the year turned over we’d drag it back outside and put it in some shade. When I was eighteen I went to college in the next state over, and I wasn’t there the night that Jake had a few too many and got behind the wheel. The tree was too heavy to move by myself; a service had to come to haul it away, barren-branched, when in our grief we forgot to give it water.