Slater’s family moves out in August. I don’t know where they go, but with any luck, it’s to a fancy suburb far, far away. The house stays empty. The house next to it still has renters, but Estelle says they’ll be leaving in October. Uli’s place looks pretty much like it did when the fence went up. The thyme in the front yard is neat and tidy—nothing like regular grass would have been by now. If you look closely, you can see apples on his mother’s tree, still green but getting bigger.
Our Montreal house sells in September. When we hear the news, Dad and I go for a walk on the beach. At first we talk about this and that: my new classes, Mom’s new condo and Dad’s plan to buy his own kayak—less expensive than a sailboat and much easier to store. Behind Dad, an old man tosses a stick for his dog. Cyclists along the roadway shout to each other in a windswept conversation.
“We should check out some of Uli’s seeds from the library,” I say. I’ve been reading about it online. The library offers a short workshop where you learn how to harvest and dry the seeds. After that you have access to any of the seeds in the library. “I want to plant apple trees.”
Dad shakes his head. “There wouldn’t be apple seeds in the collection.”
“Of course there would be! Uli’s mom trekked across Europe with them in her boot, and he went back to Edmonton to—”
Again Dad shakes his head. “Apples are like people. Children never look exactly like their parents. When you grow apple trees from seed, the fruit on the new tree never turns out exactly like the fruit it came from.”
I frown. “But then how—?”
“The apple Uli’s mother brought from Poland was small and mealy. But when Uli planted the seeds in Edmonton, the apples that grew on one of those trees were big and sweet,” Dad says. “He wanted apples like those ones, so he went back to the farm and cut off a few buds—scions, they’re called. Little slivers of tree with buds on them. Then he grafted the scions onto rootstock.”
I stare at my father. Grafting. Like what Uli did with the cherry trees. I didn’t know Dad knew all this stuff. Or cared. But maybe all these years caring was just too painful, the same way it hurt for him to visit Uli’s garden or go into his house. “Rootstock? What’s rootstock?”
“It’s part of a plant—the roots and a bit of the stump. You can choose different kinds, depending on how tall you want your tree to be. Then you graft parts of another plant onto that rootstock so it all grows together as a single tree.”
“Huh.” Why has no one—not even Uli—ever told me this before?
Dad’s really getting into the conversation now. “The rootstock part grows down into the soil. The grafted-on parts grow up and determine the kind of fruit. If you graft a few buds from Uli’s apple tree onto some rootstock, it’ll bear apples just like the ones on the tree you grafted from. They’ll be clones, actually.”
Weird. But excellent too. “I always pictured Uli bringing back seeds from Edmonton. I even imagined him tucking them into his shoe, like his mom had.”
“Nope. Little branches. He grafted them and planted a tree at each of his houses.”
I turn to look at him. “What do you mean, at each of his houses? Are you saying there are three of Uli’s apple trees?”
“There were,” Dad says. “The one behind the rental got cut down.”
“But there’s still one behind Victor’s house?” Which is empty at the moment, as we happen to know.
Dad nods. “Yup. Same variety.”
I turn and head toward the road.
“Where are you going?” He hurries to catch up with me.
“Where do we get rootstock? We have some grafting to do.”
“Now?” he asks.
“No time like the present,” I say. “How many buds do we need?”
“Depends how many trees you want to grow. I can ask if we can plant them around the building, or maybe we could plant a few in different places around the city.” He winks. “We’d increase our odds that way.”
“Gambling with fruit trees,” I say. “Uli would have loved that.”