While most everyone headed over to the church hall for cold cuts and baked beans and salad, Alonzo and I waited for Dorinda on the cemetery’s only hill, where a young sycamore grew wedged between two clumps of birches. It was hot for early May, though mercifully the nights had been cold enough to prevent the rise of mosquitoes out of the salt marshes.

Alonzo took off his perfectly tailored jacket and draped it over the sycamore’s lowest branch. “If it hadn’t been such a miserable winter,” he said, loosening his tie, “and if we hadn’t had all those nor’easters in April, maybe we wouldn’t be here.”

He didn’t mean the funeral; the weather during our senior year of high school, ten years ago now, had nothing to do with Dorinda’s mother dying of cancer this week. He was talking about the tree.

I bent to pick a few white violets, their little throats streaked blue. “I wonder which one of us she’ll expect to look after the grave,” I said.

“You, of course. You never could say no to her.”

Dorinda came up the hill then, wiping dirt from her hands.

We should have been three weeks into our summer jobs and crushes, too distracted for Dorinda’s wild plan, but thanks to those six extra snow days in April, the third week of June found us still in the stifling school cafeteria. My face was a gummy sheen of sweat and oil. It had been raining all day, a warm rain that did nothing to dispel the heat. Alonzo and I were both picking at our food when Dorinda plunked her tray down next to mine. She grinned as she handed us each a cold soda from the vending machine.

“I set a fire yesterday,” she announced airily. “Just a small one, with oil in our wok. But of course I called the fire department just in case, so now I have an excuse to bring them cookies as a thank you, which will distract them while you two deal with the tree.” She snapped a baby carrot in half with her even white teeth.

“It was probably the most excitement they’ve had in weeks,” said Alonzo, unfazed by Dorinda’s recklessness.

Much as I wanted out of the plan, I couldn’t help but smile. The fire station consisted of two engines, a couple of SUVs, and three boats for when the marsh flooded during hurricanes and they needed to rescue the stubborn oldsters who refused to follow evacuation orders. I couldn’t say I blamed them; the cots set up in the gym smelled like mildew and tended to collapse without warning. In the off-season, the firefighters lectured elementary school kids about fire safety, responded to drunk driving accidents and fender benders on the road leading to the bridge and then off the Cape, and patrolled the beaches, yelling at tourists who set their bonfires too close to the fragile grasses.

The stately white town hall would have been the natural choice for the moon tree, but a century oak already occupied the lawn, and since the police headquarters was 95 percent parking lot, the bicentennial committee had chosen the fire station for the sapling, which was grown from seeds that had orbited the moon in 1971. I didn’t realize the big sycamore was a moon tree—it looked just like the sycamore in our backyard—until it made the front page in the town paper during the cold spring of our senior year, drawing it to Dorinda’s attention and ours, too. The fire department wanted to put up a fence to prevent kids from mooning next to the tree, but the mayor’s aunt got everyone all worked up about the plan and killed it.

In summer the town seemed like a quaint seaside escape, with all the rich people strolling through the antique shops in their boat shoes and pink and green Lily Pulitzer dresses, but in the off-season, when the vacation homes emptied and half the shops and restaurants closed, it was gray and often cheerless, the year-round residents consumed with petty quibbles over local landmarks and family feuds going back to before the glass factory was built. It was the kind of town only tourists found easy to leave.

Out of the seventy-six seniors headed to college, Alonzo was one of only two leaving New England. He’d won a scholarship to Cal Tech.

“Shouldn’t it really be called a space sycamore?” he asked for the third time in as many days.

“It’s a moon sycamore. Just accept it and move on.” Dorinda tended to get cranky in the heat, which didn’t bode well for her next four years in Atlanta.

“Yeah, but the seeds were only in the vicinity of the moon, not on it. You don’t call the command module a moon lander.”

Dorinda looked about ready to smack him, so I took over. “Are we sure the cemetery is the best place to plant it? Won’t it be kind of morbid meeting up there?” I knew Dorinda had a perfectly good reason for picking the cemetery—in a town where a church had started being converted into a high-end B&B, it was the one location that couldn’t be bought or bulldozed—but I hated the sound of their bickering, so I didn’t mind having her annoyance directed at me.

“First of all, you like morbid stuff. Second of all, I’ve been reading so much about propagation that I’m going to explode if I don’t get to do something with it.” The bell rang but she ignored it, ticking off the last point on one slim, long finger, nail bitten to shards. “Third, stop trying to get out of it, Jackie. We’re not going to get caught.”

We met at Dorinda’s house since her mother was away, staying with her sister in Plymouth before the court date. In January Dorinda’s dad had gone on a business trip to Florida. He never came back. It was so cliché that it would have been funny if it hadn’t happened to someone I knew. Dorinda’s mom, a gentle and timid woman whose only resemblance to her brash daughter was her overwhelming beauty, took it pretty well, to all outward appearances. Not that those count for much.

But Dorinda had decided, apparently, that the only family you can trust is the family you choose, so she declared that we needed something to cement our friendship and reunite us in the years ahead, something more memorable than walks to the town’s only coffee shop after school and summers spent burnt by the sun and the oil in the fryers at my family’s clam shack, more memorable than weekends making mix CDs for each other and cooking up schemes to help Alonzo sneak his boyfriend past his parents. “A symbol,” she explained, once she’d devised the moon tree plan, “that no matter how far we branch out we’ll come back to earth right here, rooted together.” I managed not to laugh at the dramatic speech, but it was a near thing.

I was already sweating in the canvas pants I’d worn to avoid getting scratched up by the tree, and my mood didn’t improve when I smelled something burning as we walked into Dorinda’s house.

“No, this is good,” said Alonzo, before Dorinda could make excuses about the cookies. “They’ll want to make you feel like you did a good job, so they’ll definitely eat them. Maybe even more than one.”

Dorinda beamed and reached for my backpack. “You have the shears? You sanitized them?”

I jerked away from her, offended that she didn’t automatically count on me to do what needed to be done. “Yes, I somehow managed to remember one of the more crucial aspects of the plan.”

“Okay, okay.” She covered the cookies with aluminum foil and snagged an umbrella on her way out the door. The rain was supposed to let up, but it’d stalled over the Cape, soaking our hair and fogging my glasses so it was a constant struggle to see.

“I still think we should just go skinny-dipping or something,” I muttered in the car. All Dorinda’s propagation stuff was in the back—shovels, soil, fertilizer. It smelled terrible. “I tried climbing the sycamore in our backyard and it didn’t go well.”

“But you’ll have Alonzo to boost you up this time,” Dorinda said. I sighed, resigning myself to the inevitable.

I like sycamores best in winter—Dorinda would say this is me being morbid—because their branches look spindly and yet strong, like a skeleton’s delicate phalanges reaching up into the light. In the late spring, the new-leafed tree in front of the fire station seemed wan, sickly with its signature peeling bark, but it would still be a relief to be under its branches. Alonzo and I waited a minute after Dorinda left the car and then snuck around the side of the station, mud squelching under our feet, trying to find the angle where we couldn’t be seen but could still keep an eye on the engine bays.

Alonzo bent and hugged my calves, easily lifting me high. I felt his breath on my knees as I scrabbled for purchase on the lowest branch. Whisper-swearing the whole way, I climbed up two more branches, scraping my palms against the bark. The third branch bowed a little under my weight, so I worked my way around the trunk to climb up to another. Gingerly I sat, my back to the trunk, the steady wash of the rain erased by my drumming heartbeat. Once I caught my breath, I could hear the tinny sound of the Sox game on a portable radio and Dorinda’s fake twittery laugh.

I scooted forward on the branch, trying to make out what was in front of me through my fogged glasses. I gave up and went by touch, reaching for the slender boughs to find the soft new growth at their tips. Finally, about three feet from the trunk, I found a new shoot of the right size. I dug the heavy pruning shears out of my bag. The wood was soft, the sound of it breaking just a faint disgruntled crackle. I put the shears back in the bag and shimmied backward toward the trunk, the cutting’s tender cut side cupped in my hand. Below me Alonzo hissed in a breath. Squinting, I could just make out Dorinda leaving the station. Something was wrong: her back was too straight, and her usually easy gait had gone rigid, too fast.

Rushing as much as I could given I was over twenty feet in the air, I jammed my elbow backward, but instead of hitting bark it met something much harder, hard enough to send pain lancing up and down my arm. Suppressing a curse, I gingerly felt for the trunk behind me. A hole as big as a plate had been drilled into the tree and half-filled with cement. I didn’t know much about trees, but this had to be a bad idea, and how could it have been done without some group in town protesting?

Alonzo stifled a hiss. A man was leaving the fire station, checking over his shoulder before taking off at a jog in Dorinda’s direction. I flattened myself against the trunk. Alonzo inched closer to me, but there wasn’t time to get me down. I let the backpack dangle from my fingers, then dropped it into his arms. He headed toward a side street, running to intercept Dorinda.

I thought I’d be able to get down on my own, but both palms were scratched up worse than I’d realized and my right arm was useless, so I sat, clutching the sycamore shoot against my chest. For a while I tried to follow the game, but it wasn’t going well. I listened harder, trying to catch the wind rustling the marsh grasses, the rain trembling the hydrangeas below me.

Why was Dorinda so afraid to lose us? I couldn’t figure it out. Somewhere in the night Alonzo was prepared to brain a guy with pruning shears, and I was stuck in a tree, no doubt committing some kind of misdemeanor, all for the sake of her plan. Just the fact that we’d agreed to go along with her idea should have been evidence enough that she could count on us, that we’d stick with her no matter what.

I grew edgier as the minutes dragged on. The temperature dropped. I felt clammy all over, the way you feel when a fever breaks. My fingers hurt from clutching the sycamore cutting; I was sure it was dyed red with my blood. I stuck it in the hole and imagined jumping, limping into the dark just as Alonzo and Dorinda returned for me, knowing they’d carry me home if they needed to. And that’s when I heard snuffling and heavy breathing below me, the thump of something solid whacking the trunk.

Of course, we’d all forgotten about the firehouse dog.

“Thank you for coming,” Dorinda said. This was directed more at Alonzo than me. In the last ten years he’d lived all over the world before settling with Mark in Toronto. The furthest I’d gone was New York, and that was just for a weekend.

She sat down on the grass, heedless of her suit, motioning for us to join her. “I drove by the fire station yesterday,” she said. “When did the moon tree die?”

I handed her my little bouquet of violets. “They took it down a couple years ago. Some kind of blight,” I said.

“Did it get all the other sycamores around here?”

“Most of them. I think ours is isolated enough to be safe.”

“Maybe it was space cancer,” Dorinda said. She didn’t give us time to react to the grim joke, adding, “I can’t believe you managed to hang onto that cutting after you got caught, Jackie.”

I couldn’t lie, not with her mother’s grave fifty yards away, so I just shrugged, watching her sharp nails trimming the violet stems. The cutting that turned into our cemetery sycamore came from the tree in my parents’ backyard, still a healthy giant clogging the gutters with its leaves every autumn. In my hurry to get the cutting before Dorinda and Alonzo came over to find out what happened, I’d fallen out of the tree twice. I still had a scar on my left knee.

“What was the dog’s name?” she asked.

“What dog?” Alonzo said.

“The one that ratted Jackie out.”

“Adelaide.”

I’d never told either of them that it was the man who chased after Dorinda, a new firefighter from out of state, who drove me home. Apparently Alonzo catching up to Dorinda and draping his arm over her shoulders was enough to turn the man back. After the other firefighters found me (thanks to Adelaide, a rough-looking but genial mutt) and bandaged my hands, he volunteered to drive me home, all smiles. When I got in the car, unable to conjure a way out of the mess, Adelaide growled and ran circles around it, stopping only to leap at the windows. Reluctantly he opened the back door for her, but she jumped through to the front and placed herself right next to me on the seat, supporting my injured arm with her weight.

If I ever had a daughter, I’d name her after that pup.

That man was fired a few months later, after rumors of an inappropriate relationship with a minor rumbled through the town. It didn’t make the front page.

Dorinda’s voice lowered, so soft she sounded like her mother. “It was a stupid idea. And I’m sorry it’s been so long since we’ve been back together.”

I understood then. She had wanted to be different from her father, who’d left town and never looked back. She’d wanted a story to tell that would force her to come home to us, and to her mother. She had wanted to prevent herself from leaving us behind.

I stood up, brushing the dirt from my best dress. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get you drunk and shock your relatives.”

Alonzo took his jacket from the tree. “At least the cookies won’t be burned,” he said to Dorinda, and she laughed, her real laugh, gripping his offered hand and letting the stemless violets fall to the ground.

“Dorinda,” I said as we walked down the hill, “How often do you want me to come by to take care of—?” I gestured toward her mother’s gravesite, where a rug of fake grass covered the mounded dirt.

She looked at me, perplexed, and squeezed my hand. “I already paid for perpetual maintenance. But you’re a sweetheart, Jackie.”

And it still stung, all those years later, that she didn’t think she could count on me.