Summary
Floyd arrives with Ned so Gail can feed him. While she breastfeeds Ned, Gail tells Floyd things have to change, and he has to quit Heather. He doesn’t reply, but leaves the baby bag with her. Ree comforts her friend, reassuring her that he’ll be back for her, probably on laundry day. Gail sobs and says that at least he didn’t lie about Heather this time.
Ree and Gail go shopping for food. They discuss how it’s too expensive to have cheese on spaghetti, so the Dollys always skip it. Gail realizes she herself must have grown up rich, because it hasn’t occurred to her not to put cheese on pasta. At the house, they meet Mike Satterfield, of Three X Bail Bonds. He says they hold Jessup’s bond, and it looks like he’s a runner for not showing in court.
Ree insists that her father must be dead. She asks if there’s anything she can do to keep the house, but Mike says it isn’t worth enough to even cover the bond. He says she has thirty days, unless she can prove he is dead. Ree tells Gail she has to go back out searching.
Walking alone, Ree returns to Mr. and Mrs. Thump’s. Upon arriving, she is given a cup of something warm, and then suddenly is knocked unconscious and beaten severely. When Ree comes to, two teeth fall loose, and she spits blood. A circle of women surround her in the barn. Megan and Mrs. Thump gently reprimand Ree for not listening to their warning to stay away.
Thump Milton enters the barn and looms over Ree. Ree pees herself and vomits. Ree says she doesn’t need to know who killed him, but if her father is dead, she needs to know. Thump turns away to talk to the other Milton men who have come. Just then, Teardrop’s green truck drives up.
Teardrop gets out and tells the men in the barn that what his brother did was against their ways; however, Ree is the closest family he has left, and so he’ll be taking her from there. He says if she does wrong, they can put it on her. Thump agrees. They get Ree into Teardrop’s truck. Before leaving, Teardrop warns them that if anybody ever lays a finger on her again, they’d better have shot him first.
Ree sees double out the window as Teardrop speeds away. He parks and gives her a loaded shotgun in case anyone comes for her. Ree’s uncle snorts crank from a baby bottle and explains that Jessup became a police snitch to get out of a ten-year jail sentence. He says he’ll help her find her father’s bones, but the deal is that he can never know who did the killing. To know the murderer’s identity would obligate him to enact revenge, and thus put him at risk of being killed in return. Ree shakes his hand to make the deal.
Back home, Ree recovers in the bathtub from the women’s beating. Women from Rathlin Valley come to see her, lamenting the brutality of such mistreatment of their own kind. They give her painkillers. By dusk, Ree is on three different pills. Ree thinks about furnishing a cave for her family to live in. At one point, she wakes up and sees Teardrop sitting on the couch with a gun ready. He says he doesn’t trust people, and then compliments Ree for taking such an intense beating from the women.
They discuss how Jessup wasn’t always a snitch: his weakness was that he cared too much about his family, and so he sold out the other men. Ree figures this is why the community has shunned her family lately. Teardrop says they’ve also noticed her strength, and that opinions change, given time.
Analysis
The theme of poverty arises again when Ree and Gail go food shopping together. Gail realizes that she has never thought of something as simple as cheese on spaghetti to be a luxury, yet a family like the Dollys must always go without cheese. In an instance of verbal irony, Gail comments that she herself must have grown up rich in comparison. Small details such as this mark the difference between being poor like Gail and extremely poor like Ree.
The arrival of Mike Satterfield, the bail bond company representative, presents a new challenge for Ree. While she failed to get her father to appear in court, she maintains a chance of saving her family home if she can prove that Jessup is dead. If she does, the money posted for his bail will no longer be held as a debt.
Ree’s need to save her family from homelessness prompts her to defy the warning to stay away from Thump Milton. She returns to his home to pester him again about what happened to her father. However, her ostensibly warm welcome transforms into a brutal ambush, and Ree finds herself a battered captive in Thump’s barn. In an instance of situational irony, the formerly polite Megan and Merab Thump are among Ree’s attackers.
Although she is beaten so badly that she cannot help but vomit and urinate herself, Ree shows inhuman composure as she confronts Thump Milton and explains that she merely wants to know if her father is indeed dead. Thump and his henchmen seem to debate whether to kill Ree to put an end to her troublesome investigation, but luckily Teardrop arrives to rescue his niece. Having earned a certain level of respect as a deadly figure within Thump’s criminal network, Teardrop can negotiate for Ree being released into his care.
While taking Ree home, Teardrop lets her in on the secret that has eluded her throughout the novel: her father was murdered because people found out he became a police informer, having made a deal that would help him avoid going to prison for ten years. In an instance of situational irony, Jessup—whose irresponsibility has caused so much grief for Ree and her family—risked getting on Thump’s bad side because he didn’t want to be separated from his family for ten years. In a choice between his criminal associates and his family, Jessup chose family, and paid with his life.
Teardrop is also torn between allegiances. While he wants to help Ree locate Jessup’s body and prove his death so she can keep the house, Teardrop makes it clear that he must remain ignorant of who killed Jessup. He assumes it is one of Thump’s men, but to know the identity of his brother’s killer will inevitably provoke Teardrop to seek revenge. In this way, Teardrop reveals a more caring and responsible nature than he has shown thus far.
