We are godfathers to each other's kids

We're between pruning and bloom right now. That's about the only stretch in the year I sleep through the night.

Pruning finished on the fourteenth, which is late for us. January got away with the ice. You can't cut frozen wood without tearing the collar and then you've got cytospora in there by summer.

After bloom it's frost nights and then thinning and then the crews come through the first week of June for the Chelans, and once the Chelans start I don't sit down in my own kitchen until the Cripps Pink comes off at the end of October.

Danny's confirmation is May sixteenth. Right in the thinning. Vero's got a binder for it with tabs in it.

Rubén, my compadre, is married to Vero's cousin Lorena. He stood up at Danny's baptism. I stood up at his girl Alondra's, four years before that.

Twenty years we've been driving up to Wenatchee together. Nursery orders. A part nobody down here stocks. The meetings in January. A tote of rootstock in April if we're replanting. Two and a half hours each way. Same truck the whole time, a '99 250 I should have gotten rid of in 2014.

What we talk about on that road is payroll and the housing and whether Honeycrisp is going to hold its price, and one entire trip in 2019 we talked about my middle one's braces the whole way from Wenatchee down to Yakima, because the orthodontist wanted four thousand dollars and I didn't have four thousand dollars.

His dad passed in 2016. I carried the front left.

The first time was the June the hail came through. 2011. Twelve, maybe. I'd have to look at the insurance. We lost about sixty percent on the Bings in two blocks and the adjuster took eleven weeks to write it up. We were coming back down 97 in the dark and I pulled off at the top of Blewett where the gravel is. It was quick. Then we drove the rest of the way home with KDNA on and he got out at his house and said see you Thursday.

After that it was the truck. Only ever the truck. Never a house, nothing written down, and if I wanted to know whether he was coming Thursday I asked Lorena at the Grocery Outlet like a person.

We're in each other's houses four days a week anyway. He eats at my table most Sundays and half the Thursdays, and I'm at his. Our wives are on the phone about nothing every day of their lives. Alondra watched my kids the whole summer Vero was working doubles.

Nineteen years in August, her and me. My mother-in-law cleans the church on Fridays. Vero says tie my arms and I'd go quiet.

February me and Rubén, my compadre, both went up for the pesticide recert, him for six hours and me for four. Coming back, the pass closed. A real closure. Chains wouldn't have done anything.

We got a room in Cle Elum, off the exit where the trucks park. One room because that's what they had open, and because it was ninety dollars. The binders went on the other bed. The heater under the window ran all night and you could hear them idling out there the whole time.

That was the first time we ever did it lying down.

In the truck you never take your boots off.

The pass opened around six and we stopped at the Shell in Ellensburg and he bought two coffees and one of those sausage things off the roller and ate it standing at the counter, and the whole time I'm thinking he's about to say something, he had the face he makes where he pushes his tongue into his cheek, and he never said it, and we were back in Sunnyside by twenty to ten, and I carried the recert binders into the shop and then went and stood over the pump in block four for an hour and a half, and there's nothing wrong with that pump.

I sent Miguel up on the next two runs. Told him it was so the nursery people would learn his face.

Rubén, my compadre, came over on a Sunday in March anyway and helped me pull the motor off the little sprayer. Lorena and Vero were inside with the TV on. He handed me the wrench end first the way he has for twenty years and I took it the same way and that was the whole afternoon. Danny came out once for a Gatorade and stood there watching us work and then went back in.

April ninth we went down to twenty-nine. He was in my rows at two in the morning with his own propane, because mine are in the low ground by the drain where the cold sits. We ran the machines until six.

Around four he said compadre, and I told him it had come up a degree.

Then we talked about whether the bloom was too far out to take twenty-nine. Then it got light and he went home to sleep an hour before his own day started.

Danny's thirteen. Wednesdays since September, six thirty to eight, and a retreat in Toppenish he complained about for a month and then came back from quiet.

Two weeks ago Vero says at dinner that he picked his sponsor. They make a whole thing of it in the Wednesday class. Somebody confirmed and in good standing.

He picked Rubén, my compadre.

Vero said of course he did, that man's been at every birthday that boy has ever had.

I said that's good. I said he'll be happy about it. Then I took my plate over and rinsed it and came back and sat down.

The way it goes, the sponsor stands behind the kid with his right hand on the kid's shoulder while the bishop comes down the row. I've watched it thirty times. My brother's two. Alondra's, three years ago, and I was the one standing behind her with my hand where it goes.

So it'll be Vero, then me, then Lorena, then a hundred and forty of her people filling in behind us. And Rubén, my compadre, up there with his hand on my son.

We took Danny into Yakima for a jacket. Kid's grown three inches since Christmas. Sleeves were an inch short off the rack and the lady pinned them and said two weeks.

Last night Vero's at the table writing out the cards for the tables at the hall after. She does them in her own hand because she says mine looks like a doctor's. She asks me where to put Rubén, my compadre, and Lorena.

I said with us. She said obviously with us, she meant which side, on account of the speakers.