"No, look," Ronkers would plead. "It's more serious than that, for her"
"Then you tell her," they'd say. "I'll give you her number."
"Oh, Raunch!" Kit would scream. "Why don't you make them do it?"
"How?" Ronkers would ask.
"Tell them you won't fix them. Tell them you'll let them pee themselves blind!"
"They'd just go to someone else," Ronkers would say. "Or they'd simply tell me that they've already told the person -- when they haven't, and never intend to."
"Well, it's absurd, you calling up every other woman in the damn town."
"I just hate the long-distance ones," Ronkers would say.
"Well, you can at least make them pay for the calls, Raunch!"
"Some of these students don't have any money."
"Tell them you'll ask their parents to pay, then!"
"It's tax-deductible, Kit. And they're not all students, either."
"It's awful, Raunch. It really is."
"How much higher are you going to make this damn sleeping platform?"
"I like to make you work for it, Raunch."
"I know, but a ladder, my God
"Well, it's up in your favorite tree, right? And you like that, I'm told. And anyone who gets me has got to be athletic."
"I may get maimed trying."
"Raunch! Who are you calling now?"
"Hello?" he said to the phone. "Hello, is this Miss Wentworth? Oh, Mrs. Wentworth, well... I guess I would like to speak to your daughter, Mrs. Wentworth. Oh. You don't have a daughter? Oh. Well, I guess I would like to speak to you, Mrs. Wentworth.
"Oh, Raunch, how awful!"
"Well, this is Dr. Ronkers. I'm a urologist at University Hospital. Yes, George Ronkers. Dr. George Ronkers. Well... hi. Yes, George. Oh, Sarah, is it? Well, Sarah
And with the end of the summer there came an end to the rearrangements of the Ronkerses' interior space. Kit was through with carpentry and busy with her teaching and her school work. When the workmen left, and the tools were carried off, and the dismantled walls no longer lay heaped in the Ronkerses' yard, it must have become apparent to Bardlong that reconstruction -- at least for this year -- was over.
The walnut tree was still there. Perhaps Bardlong had thought that, in the course of the summer building, the tree would go -- making way for a new wing. He couldn't have known that the Ronkerses were rebuilding their house on the principle of "inviting the tree in."
With autumn coming on, Bardlong's issue with the black walnut tree grew clear. Old Herr Kesler had not been wrong. George and Kit had a premonition of it the first cool, windy night of the fall. They lay on the sleeping platform with the tree swirling around them and the yellowing leaves falling past them, and they heard what sounded like a candlepin bowling ball falling on their roof and thudding its way down the slope to score in the rain gutter. "Raunch?"
"That was a goddamn walnut!" Ronkers said. "It sounded like a brick out of the chimney," Kit said.
And through the night they sat bolt upright to a few more: when the wind would loose one or, toward morning, a squirrel would successfully attack one, whump! it would strike, and roll thunker-thunker-thunker-thunker dang! into the clattering rain gutter.
"That one took a squirrel with it," Ronkers said.
"Well," said Kit, "at least there's no mistaking it for a prowler. It's too obvious a noise."
"Like a prowler dropping his instruments of burglary," Ronkers said.