“Small trees had attacked my parents’ house at the foundation.” 

The saplings and their destruction foreshadow the destruction of the family unit when Geraldine is raped. Grief and trauma tear at the family’s once unshakeable bond.

“Women don't realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits. We absorb their comings and goings into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones.”

Geraldine’s husband and son feel her absence, revealing that men rely on women like timepieces. Without women, men have no sense of direction or purpose.

“I was the sort of kid who spent a Sunday afternoon prying little trees out of the foundation of his parents’ house. I should have given in to the inevitable truth that this was the sort of person I would become, in the end, but I kept fighting it.” 

Just as Joe wants his father to be a larger-than-life figure as a reservation judge, he imagines a far greater role in life for himself despite his easygoing nature and circumstances that say otherwise.