Summary
After practicing with his pit crew, Denny’s next few races go extremely well. He attracts national attention and becomes the favorite to win rookie of the year, which results in an exciting summer for the Swift family. Famous racers and race sponsors frequently join them for dinner to talk shop with Denny, filling the house with spirited conversations about the exciting details of professional racing. The symptoms of Eve’s mysterious illness have gone away, and she looks and feels healthier after starting a new exercise regimen. Things are definitely looking up.
But then, just as Denny was all but guaranteed to win rookie of the year, another racer at the Phoenix International Raceway crashes into him on the first turn. Denny is the last racer to cross the finish line. But he continues to race and spend time with Eve, Zoë, and Enzo as much as possible; he figures if he stays focused, he can still win rookie of the year and place in the top ten overall. While he is home, Denny and Eve are trying to have another baby, but Eve has not been able to get pregnant. Overall though, despite Denny’s recent loss, things are on an even keel.
On one of his weeks off, Denny takes the family to the Cascades to Denny Creek for a day of hiking and swimming in the streams. What starts out as an idyllic family trip turns into a nightmare when Eve slips on a rock, falls, and hits her head on the rocky bottom of the creek. She falls hard, so when she stands, she is disoriented and slurs her words. Denny loads everyone into the car and drives to the hospital, where they leave Enzo to wait in the parking lot.
Hours later, Denny returns to the parking lot, lets Enzo out to pee, and feeds him peanut butter crackers from the hospital vending machine. Denny’s friend Mike from work shows up to take Enzo back to his house. Denny gives Mike a spare set of keys so he can stop by the Swifts' house and take Enzo’s food, bed, and toys to his house. Enzo overhears Denny and Mike’s conversation, and it sounds like Eve has a brain tumor. They might not even bother to biopsy it before waiting to perform surgery because of how much it impacts her behavior and quality of life already.
Mike retrieves Enzo’s things from Denny and Eve’s house and takes Enzo home. When they settle into Mike’s house, Mike and his husband, (to whom he refers in conversation with Denny as his wife), notice that Enzo’s most prized possession, his stuffed dog toy, is terribly dirty and stinky, so they put it in the washing machine. This upsets Enzo tremendously, because he actually appreciates the way the toy smells. He watches the toy tumble around in the washing machine until it is finished washing, and in the end, he finds that he actually prefers his toy clean and warm from the drier.
Eve remains in the hospital for weeks, leaving Denny and Zoë to form a highly regimented schedule around school, work, and hospital visits. Denny always packs the same lunch for Zoë: a peanut butter and banana sandwich on whole-wheat bread with chips and cookies. He picks her up from school, makes dinner, and attends to the long list of tasks that accompany having a loved one in the hospital, like paying bills and calling the insurance company. Denny and Zoë hardly have time to take care of themselves, let alone play with Enzo; and, needless to say, Denny has to quit the racing circuit to be there for his family.
After two weeks of Eve in the hospital and Denny and Zoë following their new regimented schedule, Maxwell and Trish insist upon taking Zoë for the weekend. Eve tells Denny to take the weekend for himself. So Denny and Enzo revert back to their bachelor ways for a day. They go jogging, order pizza, and watch racing tapes. But they both feel a strong absence—they are not enjoying the leisure like they used to. After dinner, Denny cannot stand the feeling any longer, so he goes to the hospital to visit Eve. When he returns home to Enzo, he repeatedly tells him that Eve is going to be okay, but the assurance feels hollow and unconvinced.
Analysis
Chapter 16 marks a peak in the lives of the Swift family, and it forecasts a disaster on the horizon. One of the many effects of having a narrator tell the story from a point in the future is that we readers already know that, even in the moments of greatest hope and happiness, a tragedy waits just around the corner. So when we read the final passage of this chapter describing an idyllic scene of Zoë running through the sprinkler in the yard, shrieking with joy, and Denny and Eve giggling in the kitchen over an intimate inside joke, the scene’s joyousness may have the opposite effect on the reader: the joy may actually fill us with dread, because we know that the Swifts' happiness cannot possibly last much longer.
The day trip to the Cascades in Chapter 17 is the dreadful turning point we have been anticipating. When Eve smashes her head on a river rock, she can no longer hide from physicians. Now, Denny has no choice but to take her to a hospital, where they will find out what has been wrong with her this whole time. Enzo draws attention to the fact that Zoë has been at the center of both of her mother’s major recent injuries: first the knife slipping off the hotdog package, and now her fall in the creek (when Eve fell, she was dipping Zoë in the water). Enzo says, “Eve lay unmoving, and there was Zoë, again the cause, not knowing what to do” (96). Of course, any adult would hesitate to say that Zoë is “the cause” of her mother’s injuries; but Enzo does not mean to accuse Zoë, but rather simply to observe the coincidental link. If anything, Zoë’s role in her mother’s injuries could be seen as blessings in disguise, because the only way Eve would see a doctor and address her brain disease is if she were forced into a hospital by an acute injury. At Denny’s Creek, such a crisis finally occurs.
At the hospital, we meet Denny’s co-worker Mike again. We have met Mike before, but at this point in the novel he has served mostly as a background character. Mike makes an off-color joke in the parking lot about how his wife has mood swings, so maybe she has a brain tumor, too; but when Mike brings Enzo back to his house, we learn that Mike’s partner is actually a man. Mike’s omission about his home life tells us a lot about his and Denny’s relationship, or lack thereof. Clearly Denny trusts Mike enough to take care of Enzo, to have an extra set of keys to his house, and to inform him of intimate family health scares. They spend time together in a small autobody shop, working full, long days. And yet, this huge part of Mike’s life is kept hidden from Denny. Stein’s inclusion of this peek into Mike’s home life is an indication that he will become a more prominent character as the novel progresses. The scene at Mike’s house also reinforces the idea of Enzo, and dogs in general, as silent witnesses to private moments in humans’ lives—this idea that people can trusts dogs because of the limitations of their communicative abilities.
In Chapter 20, Denny and Enzo have alone time together for the first time in years. The activities they reenact while Zoë is with her grandparents and Eve is in the hospital are the same activities that became rarer when Eve moved in with them and almost non-existent once Zoë was born. And at first, Enzo longed for alone time with Denny. When Eve and Denny got married, Enzo was jealous because Denny would jog with him less and have less time to laze around and watch racing tapes. But under the current circumstances, when Denny and Enzo try to go out and do the same old activities they used to do, they realize that their lives are fundamentally different now. They both enjoy having a family and would always rather be in the company of Eve and Zoë than be eating delivery pizza in a bachelor pad. So despite Eve having explicitly told Denny not to visit her during his weekend alone with Enzo, Denny could not resist the urge to see his wife and be by her side. This gesture marks the end of any trace of nostalgia Denny and Enzo hold for the days when it was just the two of them.
