Chapters (28)
“And you don’t think that people should go to jail for planting fruit trees,” I said. “So don’t act like you suddenly have respect for the law.”
“Perley says he likes school,” said Lily. “He even has a friend. The kid from down the road. Bexley.”
“Bexley and Perley aren’t friends. They’re foes,” I said. “Bexley calls him a faggot bastard because he doesn’t have a dad.”
It fell on them like a blow from my hand.
“We’re taking him out of school immediately,” Karen said.
“But Perley wants to stay in school,” Lily said, her eyes wet.
“We don’t have to do everything he wants to do. We’re his parents. We have to make decisions,” Karen said.
“It’s true that I don’t think Rudy is a positive male role model,” I said. “But I do think that maybe just getting Rudy and Perley together might help Perley fit in.”
“I don’t want him to fit in,” Karen said. “I want him to tear everything apart and start over.”
“Rudy is unbearable,” I said. “Yet he is highly skilled and actually strangely sensitive. Also, he is reliable.”
They sat with it for a moment. They looked at each other.
“He can pick him up and drop him off at school as long as he’s sober,” Lily said.
“He can teach him about trees, he can teach him to use a goddamn chain saw, for all I care. But that doesn’t make him a ‘positive male role model.’ This isn’t Focus on the fucking Family,” Karen said.
Though our fruit tree business was essentially finished, Rudy kept the nursery going. As winter approached, he mulched the trees eight inches high, swaddled them in yards of burlap. He put a sign down at the mailbox: COME UP AND GET YOURSELF A FRUIT TREE! EXPERIENCE THE TRANSFORMATIVE WONDER OF FRUIT TREE STEWARDSHIP. GRATIS! Lily planted two Idared apple trees at the top of our garden, but other than that I don’t know that he had any takers.
Rudy’s request to roll out his sleeping bag in the nursery remained unchallenged and spread beyond weeks into more than a month. As it got colder, I lent him my wall tent with its miniature woodstove, and he built a platform for it, on the far side of the pipeline easement, next to his trees. I knew that feeling, the feeling of proximity after being alone for so long. Rudy didn’t live with us, he lived four hundred feet away from us. To people for whom togetherness was an unfathomable riddle, to people who hovered but never drew near, to Rudy, four hundred feet was downright cozy.