In Stone Fruit, Bron and Ray help parent Ray’s single-mother sister’s daughter Nessie, retreating with her into a fantasy world largely of Bron’s creation. Nessie readily takes to it, and the three of them seem like a happy family. That is, until Ray’s sister calls and you realize the situation. She seems to harbor negative feelings towards Bron, or at least that’s how Ray interprets things, and pleads for more structure her child when she’s with the two of them. From here, the cracks start to form in both Bron and Ray’s relationship and the sisterly bond, and Lee Lai spends the rest of the novel putting them back together.
Thankfully, Nessie is a strong glue to force them together until those bonds can be mended and reforged. Though she may only be six, she is arguably the most important person to all three of them, the catalyst for everything that plays out. People often say you can’t pick your family, but Stone Fruit seems to argue against that very notion. Ray’s sister saw her family fall apart, with Nessie’s dad leaving her, and Ray not a part of her life, but Ray jammed herself back into their lives, for better or worse, and brought Bron along with her. And, as her sister says, when she did that, she unwittingly agreed to a deal that offers no breaks or down time. Ray has to always be there and be “on” for Nessie. This is what she signed up for.
Then with Bron, she chose to leave her entire family and start a new one with Ray and Nessie. She revisits that family, trying to make a fresh start, at one point, yet finds it’s not as simple as things in her weird, yet tough in their own way, bubble with Ray and Nessie. The resulting situation might be wildly unconventional, but it works somehow, and isn’t that the best we can ask for from “family”?