A Complicated Kindness

Nomi thinks of the summer job Tash had making sure their grandmother didn’t get drunk on vanilla; Tash believed it was The Mouth’s fault that their grandmother drank. Then Nomi spends a lazy day with Travis before she is sent home by his parents after they fall asleep together.

At home, Ray confronts her about skipping school and her failing grades. She makes jokes about it and goes to her room, thinking about Travis’s job at the historic village, where he often plays the role of husband to Adeline Ratzlaff, another local girl. When Nomi leaves her room, Ray has gone driving, and she leaves him a note saying she’ll go to school tomorrow.

She goes to the historic village and sees Travis and Adeline smoking pot together. She questions him about Adeline, and he denies anything is going on. Nomi wanders over to the general store, where the employee encourages her to read the Bible. Nomi recalls being five years old and having a book that showed the blood of Jesus. When she scratched a mosquito bite and saw her blood was a different color, she pricked her fingers until they bled, looking for the matching shade.

Nomi returns to the day her mother left and reveals that her mother was excommunicated. Afterward, Ray stared out the window all day, and Nomi wandered the town. At Rest Haven, she ran into Mrs. Klippenstein and realized she’d been there for a while, leading her to question where her mother was going when she claimed to be working for the woman. When Nomi cleaned out her mother’s room, she found letters from Mr. Quiring about Trudie’s affair with him.

Nomi wanders town again and returns home to find Ray asleep in his lawn chair. She checks the car and sees he drove almost 300 miles. She puts a blanket on Ray and leaves a note for him: “Why didn’t she take me with her?” (192). She goes to bed and wakes to her father by her bedside, telling her about the storm that started up and caused the manhole covers to come off around town.

Downstairs, the living room furniture is gone. She asks Ray why he’s selling their things, and he tells her he likes the potential of empty spaces. She sees the response to her note: “She didn’t take you with her because you were sleeping when she left” (194), which she takes both literally and metaphorically. She goes to school, where they are having a baseball tournament. She decides to either stand completely still or move at a dead sprint and wonders if she could spend her “entire life in two gears, neutral and fourth” (195). After school, she wanders to St. Malo and goes swimming, then gets a ride home.

For Ray’s birthday, Nomi makes dinner and the cake her mother made her when she discovered that a letter she’d written to her dead grandfather and thrown into the wind had not made it to heaven; instead, Trudie had written a reply and given it to her, which Nomi realized after finding the original letter in the yard. Nomi and Ray take the TV outside and watch a baseball game together.

After Ray goes to bed, Travis and Nomi go to paint a barn but get high and end up painting all over themselves. The next day, Nomi takes her rented French horn to the school secretary and attempts to get her deposit back; the secretary refuses, as students only get their money back on graduation. Nomi goes to pick some flowers and intends to trade them for drugs.

She wakes up on her old couch in the Golden Comb’s trailer; he bought it from Ray in the middle of the night. He and Eldon offer to take the French horn for drugs, but she refuses, thanking them for the rest and the beer they gave her.

She goes home and sees Ray clipping coupons; she knows he doesn’t know anything about shopping, and he doesn’t know why he’s doing it. They go to the demolition derby together, and then Ray lets her practice her driving. They drive around together, not wanting to go home.

Travis and Nomi spend the night roaming town and drinking, then give each other haircuts. In the morning, Nomi uses Tash’s old razor to shave her head, puts on jewelry, makeup, and a bikini top, and heads to school. Mr. Quiring confronts her about her missing homework assignments the dress code and then throws her out of class.

She goes to Ray’s school and watches him tell his class about an upcoming choral performance they must give. He sees her through the window and sends her home, where she takes a nap.

When she wakes up, a woman is in the house and lying on the floor. Ray tells her that she is Edwina McGallivray; he found her disoriented at school and brought her home to rest. She is from the city and is there to judge the performance Ray was talking about with his students.

The three of them sit outside where it’s cooler, and Edwina realizes she knows Trudie from her time as an actress and singer at a local playhouse. Nomi is amazed at this, having never heard it before.

Nomi goes to the historic village to meet Travis, and they goof around until Adeline comes out and tell him to get back to work. Nomi watches some people building a windmill when an American teenager approaches her. She tells him where to score drugs, then watches as a pig is slaughtered. That night, she and Travis have sex for the first time; Nomi thinks it might have gone better if she “hadn’t been bald, drunk, depressed and jealous” (216).

Ray comes home from driving at four in the morning, and Nomi poaches him an egg. He asks her if she intends to stay in East Village forever, and she tells him she’s tired. He touches the fishhook scar on her head, and Nomi recalls the day she got it: the family went out on a boat to an island on Falcon Lake, and Tash accidentally cast a fishing line backward and cut Nomi. In the confusion, the boat drifted away, and the family spent the day happy that they were stranded on an adventure together before the boat reappeared.

Nomi asks him about the play Trudie was in, and he tells her that The Mouth took her to the audition and that things between them were different then. He then tells her that Mrs. McGillivray gave his class a low score on their performance and that he can’t understand why.

Later that morning, Nomi awakens and sees the kitchen table and chairs gone. Her dad calls her and says she missed her driving test, but he rescheduled it. They meet up after school, and she passes her driving test. Then they go home, and she cooks dinner, pretending to ignore the fact that Travis hasn’t called her since they had sex.

She calls Travis’s house, and his mother says he’s working for his father but won’t tell Nomi where. She drives to Travis’s house and is greeted by his parents. She lies, telling them she left something in his room, but they don’t want to let her in. Travis’s mother tells her she’ll forget all about this in time.

Nomi narrates her evening out of order, though she begins by saying she went to the Kryo Motor Inn, the hospital, the Golden Comb’s Silver Bullet, and the blue field near the dump, in that order.

At the hospital, Nomi looks for Lydia but can’t find her. An orderly she knows tells her that Lydia has been sent to Eden, a mental institute, for shock therapy. Nomi goes to the nurse’s station and begins to panic, telling the nurse that she thinks she’s dying and tries to roll a joint in front of her. The nurse tells her to relax and go home.

Before the hospital, she sets fire to Travis’s truck at the Inn, then goes into the store for a soda and sees Gloria, who is confused that Nomi is still in town despite saying goodbye earlier. Then Nomi goes to her grandmother’s old house. No one is home, so she goes up to Trudie’s old bedroom and lays down, then finds a class picture that belongs to the boy who lives there; he’s in Ray’s class.

From there, she goes to the Golden Comb’s trailer, where she has sex with him in exchange for drugs. Afterward, he drives her back to her car, and she takes it to the field to get high. She thinks she could live in her car and is fantasizing about that when she sees Ray approaching her with coffee for them. They make small talk, and she admits she’s not looking forward to her future. He tells her that the flipside to her thinking is faith.

Later that day, The Mouth and his wife come over. He tells Nomi she’s been excommunicated. He says it’s for lack of attendance and for setting the fire, and Nomi doesn’t protest. The Mouth asks where their furniture went, and Ray can’t explain, so Nomi tells him they’re cleaning up.

After The Mouth leaves, Ray quotes a Bible verse to Nomi, and then they make small talk about dinner and laundry. Ray takes the car keys and leaves Nomi alone. She takes her French horn up to Abe’s Hill and learns a song, playing until her lips are too numb to hold a cigarette.

Ray leaves town, gifting Nomi the car, all their remaining belongings, and a note with instructions on how to sell the house. She doesn’t know how he left a town with no train or bus station. In the note, he tells her he will give her “a year or two or five to develop your system. In the meantime, we have work to do. Remember the affirmative words of Jesus, Nomi. Lo, I am with you always” (239). He puts two bible verses on his note: one from Isaiah about going out with joy and another that says, “Remember, when you are leaving, to brush the dust from your feet as testimony against them” (240).

Nomi knows that Ray had to leave because he couldn’t bear choosing between his faith and his daughter. As she packs her things, the neighbor girl comes out, and they play for a while, and then Nomi begins to think about the town and her experience in it. She pivots to writing an assignment to Mr. Quiring, still seeking his approval somehow even though she knows that it’s his doing that got his mother excommunicated, that he threatened her when she tried to break off the affair. Nomi thinks that grief drove her mother to Mr. Quiring, and love was what pulled her back.

Nomi thanks Ray; she knows she would never have left him there alone and that his leaving was a gift to her. The story of where her mother went that Nomi likes best is similar: she left to spare Ray the pain of her excommunication. The Mouth once commented that she probably killed herself; Nomi rejects that, thinking that the story she tells is what matters and will lead to her redemption.