45 pages • 1 hour read
Marissa StapleyLucky
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapter 9-Interlude 10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 9 Summary
In 2008, Lucky arrives in San Francisco and is unsure where to go next. She chooses randomly from the bus schedule and heads to Baker City, Oregon. During her ride, she reads stories in the newspaper about her and Cary’s crimes, as well as the lottery ticket being unclaimed. Lucky makes a list of people to pay back if she can collect her winnings. She gets off the bus at Little Spring, a small town near Baker City, and goes into Little Spring’s only diner. After washing in the bathroom, she orders food and asks the owners about their help wanted sign. Lucky claims to be named Ruby Cullen, a mother who is backpacking around the country. The couple, Benson and Arlene, agree to let her try waiting tables during the lunch rush.
Lucky is good at waiting tables during the small lunch rush and they invite her to work the dinner rush as well. Her success waiting tables during dinner causes the owners to offer her a room, as well as a job, for as long as she needs. She borrows their library card and looks up Priscilla, Darla, and Steph using a fake social media profile. After several days in Little Spring, she tells Benson and Arlene that she located a friend (Steph) in Seattle. They tell her that she is welcome to come back anytime.
In Seattle, Lucky buys clothes and contact lenses to create a new identity as a potential buyer for a home that Steph is selling as a realtor. She overhears Steph talking to Darla on the phone, then tours the house. Steph is married and has a son. Darla babysits sometimes, but she is working, which makes Lucky wonder about her financial situation. After the house tour, Lucky says that she has to go and pick up her kids. She feels like meeting Steph was fated.
Part 1, Interlude 9 Summary: “January 1999, Sausalito, California”
Seventeen-year-old Lucky lives with her father in a houseboat that he won in a poker game. She tells him that she wants to take a high school equivalency exam and the SAT so that she can go to college. John gets a job at a restaurant and Lucky starts working as a hostess there. He meets Priscilla Lachaise and Marisol Reyes at the restaurant and starts working with them on scams. John is secretive about his work but says that his new coworkers helped him get identification documents for Lucky as Alaina Cadance. Lucky does excellently on her exams and plans to study accountancy at the University of San Francisco. John doesn’t spend much time with her.
After her exams, Lucky starts seeing a group of teenagers who regularly hang out at the pier during the summer. She is attracted to one of the boys, Alex, who later is revealed to be Cary. One day, he buys her an ice cream and invites her to a bonfire party. She reads alone until after nine and then goes to the party. There, she flirts with Alex and gets drunk for the first time. They both like numbers and end up kissing near the bay at the end of their date.
Part 1, Chapter 10 Summary
In the Seattle Greyhound station, in 2008, Lucky cuts her hair shorter and bleaches it blond. She tries to call Gloria at Devereaux Camp on a payphone. When Gloria answers, Lucky is unable to speak. She goes into a used bookstore and buys Les Misérables. Then, she buys a ticket to Fresno and comes up with a new alias on the bus: Jean, a failed screenwriter who ended up on the streets and is hoping to find help at Priscilla’s Place, a shelter. Before going there, Lucky rents a storage unit, hides her lottery ticket in the smoke detector, and hides access codes to the unit in the cover of her book.
Part 1, Interlude 10 Summary: “August 1999, Sausalito, California”
Alex (Cary) tells Lucky that he’s in love with her, and she says that she doesn’t know him very well. He lies, saying that his parents are dead. They switch to lighter subjects, such as their favorite books and movies. Lucky lies to John, saying that she made a friend named Alexa. Reyes spots Lucky and Alex together. The next day, Priscilla comes over to the boathouse. After making small talk, Lucky leaves and runs into Reyes. Reyes warns Lucky that Alex is not who he says he is—he is Priscilla’s son, named Cary Matheson. Lucky calls Cary and confronts him about his lies. He believes that their identities are rooted in their criminal activities. Cary says that “[y]ou want to find someone you can pretend with” when she tries to break up with him (132). He argues that they can be truthful with one another—but no one else—because they are both grifters. His style of argumentation reminds her of John’s. Cary swears that he loves Lucky, but she breaks up with him.
The next day, Lucky tells Reyes that she and Cary broke up. Reyes feels guilty, and Lucky is able to pressure her into revealing that Priscilla’s business—where John works—is a fake charity. Reyes is concerned that they are about to get caught. John interrupts the conversation and goes off with Reyes on the bus. Lucky follows the bus, which is caught in traffic, on a stolen bike. She watches Reyes and John go into a building, and she gets a table at a nearby cafe. Lucky confronts Reyes when she leaves the building, and Reyes tells her to leave.
Eventually, the police discover Priscilla’s scam. Before John is about to be arrested, he calls Lucky and tells her to get the lockbox and run. She rides the bike back to the building and sees John and Reyes being arrested. Back on the houseboat, she opens the lockbox, which has a letter to her from John saying that she should distance herself from him and use the accompanying money to make her first college tuition payment. Cary is waiting for Lucky outside of the houseboat. He gives her a puppy named Betty, remembering that Lucky wanted to rescue a dog. Cary convinces her to be with him by playing on her fears of being alone and not being able to afford college.
Later, when John is arraigned, Cary persuades Lucky to forget about John, since he will be in prison for a long time. Then, he tells her a plan to get out of town before Priscilla’s plea bargain goes through. Again, Cary reminds Lucky of John.
Part 1, Chapter 9-Interlude 10 Analysis
In this section, Stapley explores the meaning of home. The sections about the past include when Lucky and John live on a houseboat in Sausalito. They think, “Maybe this was it. Their home” (109). This suggests that they associate a sense of home with permanency and that something can only become home if they remain there. A houseboat, however, represents a mixture of shelter and transience or precarity since it may change moorings and is connected to shore with lines. Lucky longs to settle down, but her father’s grifts often keep them on the road. During their time in Sausalito, John tries to give up his criminal habits and succeeds for a while, but ultimately Lucky must keep moving. In the 2008 storyline, when Lucky meets another man on a bus looking for shelter at Priscilla’s Place, Stapley draws attention to socioeconomic disparity (particularly in a financial crisis) that prevents many more people than just Lucky from having a home. The novel hence highlights the privilege of having a permanent and secure home.
This section fills in more information about the other major male influence on Lucky: her long-term boyfriend, Cary. Between him and John, she “had never been alone in her life” (138). Stapley hence reinforces the patriarchal dynamics that inhibit Lucky’s independence. She had always lived with a man. Cary and Lucky meet in Sausalito when she is a teenager when Cary is going by an alias, Alex. After discovering his lies, Lucky tries to break up with Cary, but he wins her over by getting her a dog named “Betty” (136). This detail suggests that Cary infantilizes Lucky; it is one of the many points in the novel in which he is comparable to her father, reinforcing the patriarchal dynamics that prevent Lucky from surviving on her own.
Cary’s relationship with his mother, Priscilla, also develops the theme of Familial and Romantic Influences. Cary takes on the Alex identity to hide the fact that his mother is John’s boss—and the person who persuaded John to return to criminal activities. Lucky also tries to break up with Cary because she doesn’t want to be involved with Priscilla. Priscilla’s characterization hence becomes more obviously antagonistic in this section as she influences Cary, Lucky, and John.
Stapley develops the theme of Performance and Lies in this section as she suggests that the performance of identity is a form of wish fulfillment. Cary, for example, believes that Lucky wants to “pretend with” a romantic partner to fulfill her desire for a crime free life and forget her past. Furthermore, when Lucky becomes Ruby Cullen, the performance includes “pretending to be a mother” (104). This con “opened that wound” of her actual miscarriage (104), detailed in Interlude 13. This suggests that Lucky’s identity performances each give her some hope for a new life, complicating the notion of the immorality of grifting and scamming.
The lottery ticket symbolism continues to develop in this section. While Lucky wants to use it to escape her life of crime, she also wants to make amends for her crimes—paying back the people they ripped off. The ticket hence represents hope for atonement rather than simply personal gain. The condition of the physical object also reflects the way Lucky is constantly traveling. It becomes slightly torn and dirty: “[S]he needed to find a place to keep it where it wouldn’t get so beaten up—but that was a hard thing to do when you were constantly on the move” (96). This connects to Lucky’s desire for a permanent home.
Stapley uses literary references to convey Lucky’s experiences and desires. Lucky stashes the ticket in the smoke detector of a storage unit and hides the code for the storage unit in a used copy of Les Misérables. Not only is this novel partly about a man (Jean Valjean) raising a child who is not his biological daughter (Cosette), like John and Lucky, as well as a woman who struggles to survive alone (Fantine), like Lucky, but the novel portrays disenfranchised people rising up against the establishment, which reflects Lucky’s hopes for a new life.
