and the popularity of each hybrid or heirloom vegetable and fruit. How are Tengbo and Ravi doing? What can be done to help them? Both are citizens now, but their families have immigration issues. Andrew John has contacted lawyers who will help them, if need be.
Rocco likes these conversations: calm and highly focused. He often feels as if Andrew John is looking slightly past him, into the future. That must be what a visionary is.
Rocco certainly isn’t one. He can’t see into the future. In fact, some days—some more than others—he feels as if it’s an accomplishment to get up and put one foot in front of the other. That’s another reason he doesn’t mind working for someone who pays him well enough to be paying off the mortgage on his own little house, and who makes him feel as if his work is important and valued.
After their business conversation ends, Andrew John invites Rocco to tour his greenhouse, where he is working on multiple projects: easily grown lichen that is nutritious and delicious, organic aphid-resistant cabbage, hydroponically grown sunflowers.
Today he shows Rocco pots in which he is raising a beautiful species of daffodil with delicate petals, frosted silver.
“What do you call it?” Rocco asks.
Andrew John loves naming brands and breeds. It’s my poetry, he often says.
“Lunar narcissus,” Andrew John says.
Rocco thinks of the circus.
He’d been amazed that Charlotte let them take Daisy. Mostly he disapproves of how Charlotte is raising his niece. He loves his sister, but he wishes she were different, and he suspects that she feels the same way about him. It’s not just envy of her easy life, her money. Charlotte and Eli have no real respect for labor, for hard work. Eli hasn’t had to work in years, and though Charlotte spends lots of time at her job, it’s not like loading turnips and carrots on and off a truck.
Charlotte shelters Daisy, teaching her to be frightened of her own shadow and then obsessing about why she seems so timid. Maybe Rocco wouldn’t be so concerned if their mother had been different. Sane. Maybe he wouldn’t find himself worrying that Charlotte’s wound so tight she might snap. If Eli weren’t a sensible guy, Daisy would have been in therapy when she was in her baby carrier, her little limbs flopping helplessly against the adult chest propelling her through the world. If Rocco has children, he will do a better job. He thinks Ruth wants children, though—thank God—the subject never comes up. When they pass a child on the street, her gaze catches and lingers.
He has no idea how long this whatever-it-is with Ruth will last, but already it’s set a record for how long he can stay interested. He doesn’t know what it is, maybe some brightness of spirit. She’s a fighter. She’s not going to drown, and she means to keep Rocco dog-paddling right alongside her.
She’s never tried to psychoanalyze him, in that irritating way so many of his other girlfriends did, even though they were the crazy ones. Maybe it’s because her childhood was as bad as his. They both had mothers who were, to say the least, unreliable. Both of their mothers are far away now: Rocco’s mom in Oaxaca and Ruth’s in Scottsdale.
Rocco likes having sex with Ruth; she likes to try new things, and when it doesn’t work, when their bodies won’t fit together a certain way, she laughs. He’s never met a woman who thought sex was funny. It was always so deadly serious, you had to check your sense of humor at the bedroom door. In bed and out, Ruth is energetic and generous, but never freaky or weird. Well, maybe a little weird, just enough to make things interesting. And she has never asked—never seemed to care—about the other women he’s been with. Another first, in his experience.
Lately he’s been feeling as if a page has been turned. Ruth has her quirks, but she’s not insane. He must have been a different person to have gotten involved with those others. Who was that guy who dated cutters, suicidal shoplifters, gambling addicts, closet alcoholics, each time choosing to ignore the signs or to be the last person to figure it out?
He even likes staying over at Ruth’s apartment: also a first, for him. She’s decorated her place with stuff she’s gotten from her grandparents and rescued from the street, and it has a breezy charm, like her—neutral, not too girly. There’s a big TV, a comfortable couch, which—she