Lu

Christina Richardson is owner of Picasso of Produce, a fruit sculpture business, which Lu helps with during his summer vacations. Lu explains that his mother has “made it all. I’m talking about baby cribs out of watermelon rind, cars out of cantaloupe” (63). Christina’s sculptures are both creative and take on symbolic meaning in the text. An important aspect of Christina’s character is that she always views people and things as being more than what they appear to be on the surface. Christina explains to Lu how she came to fall in love with his father, Goose, who at the time was working as a drug dealer: “When I met him, your dad was a street dude. At least that’s what everybody said. But after I started talking to him, I realized he was more than what people thought about him. He was more than his stutter. More than Goose. And that’s why we worked” (147). It would have been easy for Christina to listen to the warnings from those around her and write Goose off. But instead, Christina chose to get to know him. Much like the creations she makes out of fruit, Christina sees the potential in those around her and helps them reach their full potential.

Lu internalizes this way of viewing the world. At the end of the text, Lu looks around at his fellow teammates, all of whom have given up their championship meet to support Coach and his family at the hospital after his son suffered an asthma attack. The Defenders athletes are all different: they come from diverse backgrounds, take part in different events, and do not always get along. But Lu sees that they do offer one another unwavering support, which leads him to make the following comparison: “We were all there. All of us. Like one of my mother’s weird fruit sculptures, pieces of melon and berries and kiwi and a bunch of different kinds of oranges, all made to look like a team. A family. But it was like the toothpick to hold us in place was on the other side of the double doors” (209). Like his mother’s sculptures, each member of the team is like a piece of unique fruit that makes up the sculpture. Each piece is important, and the toothpick holding it all together, the structural integrity, is Coach.