Summary
The day after Eve dies and her parents threaten to sue Denny, Denny meets with a lawyer named Mark at his regular coffee spot near Zoë’s bus stop. The lawyer’s brusque manner and impersonal, fast-paced way of discussing the possibility of a custody battle clearly upsets Denny, but he still takes comfort in Mark’s confidence about the case. Mark says, “Children are not chattel. They cannot be given away or traded in the marketplace. Everything that happens will be done in the best interest of the child” (181).
Mark asks Denny a series of background questions. He asks if Denny has any secrets, including whether he is a sex offender or in a drug treatment program. Denny answers no to all the questions. Then they discuss Mark’s rates. He charges $450 per hour. He estimates that the whole process will cost Denny between $7-8,000 in legal fees. Denny assures Mark that he would pay any price necessary to keep custody of Zoë. Mark advises Denny to always be polite and civil to Eve’s parents and never to get angry, because it will only work against him.
Shortly after Denny’s meeting with Mark, the Seattle police show up to the auto-body shop in the middle of his shift, handcuff him, and charge him with third-degree rape of a child. Enzo witnesses the whole thing, because Denny has been bringing him to work ever since Eve died. Enzo explains that most of the events of the custody charges and the rape trial happened out of his sight, so he has to rely on his knowledge of the show Law and Order to fill in the blanks.
The police take Denny to the station and book him. After a long period of sitting alone in an interrogation room, his lawyer Mark bursts into the station and bails him out. Outside of the station, Mark is furious with Denny. He emphasizes the seriousness of the charges and suggests that the timing of the charges is not a coincidence—someone may have planned to frame Denny with these charges in order to influence the outcome of the custody case. He demands that Denny come to his office early the next morning.
The night of his arrest, Mike and his partner Tony bring Enzo back to Denny’s house and offer their emotional support. They want to spend some time with him that night and make sure he takes care of himself, but Denny sends them away, saying that he would rather be alone. Mike persists for a while and suggests that Denny’s emotional state might make him a danger to himself, but Tony eventually convinces Mike to relent. Mike tells Denny to call him if he needs anything.
When Mike and Tony leave, Denny pours himself a liquor drink. Enzo barks at him not to drink it. He explains in his narration that if Denny succumbs to heavy drinking as a response to the stress of his situation, he will make himself into a “pathetic cliché” (204). Denny drains the drink and Enzo retreats into Zoë’s room. After a while, Denny appears in Zoë’s doorway and tells Enzo not to give up on him. He put the liquor away and slides a home video into the VHS player. Denny and Enzo sit on the couch watching a family video of Denny, Zoë, and Eve in happier times.
Analysis
The fact that Denny meets his custody lawyer in the same coffee shop that he hung out in with the other father from Zoë’s bus stop signals a massive shift in Denny’s state of affairs. It demonstrates how the situation could always be worse. Before, when Denny was meeting with the dad, he was distraught because his wife was bedridden with brain cancer; but now, as he sits across from Mark, Eve is dead and he is entering into a custody battle with his in-laws. Stein uses the classic “man-in-a-hole” plot arc—the worse Stein makes Denny’s situation, the more powerful his efforts to overcome the adversity will seem.
The meeting with Mark also emphasizes the class differences between Denny and his in-laws. Legal fees are expensive, and Denny’s work schedule has already been significantly curtailed in recent months as he dealt with the terminal decline of his wife. Maxwell and Trish, on the other hand, have seemingly unlimited resources in comparison with Denny. The meeting also foreshadows the return of the Annika situation when Mark asks Denny if he is a sex offender. Of course, we the reader would never suspect Denny of being a sex offender, but we know that there is still a very volatile secret between Denny and Annika that could, at this very moment, destroy Denny’s chances of keeping his daughter. In the very next chapter, this suspicion manifests itself, and Denny is arrested for third-degree child rape.
The theme of experiential versus intellectual knowledge continues with Denny’s arrest when Enzo explains that since he was absent during most of the custody battle and criminal trial, he has to rely on his extensive viewing of procedural crime shows to describe this period of time in Denny’s life. This may be Stein acknowledging Enzo’s unreliability as a narrator, but it could also be a sly fiction trick of explaining away how Enzo would be able to describe scenes at the police station and in the courtroom.
Chapter 35 marks an important fork in the road for Denny’s character. When he pours himself a liquor drink, it recalls the scene in Chapter 11 when Denny drinks liquor after striking Enzo. The fact that this is the only time Denny has ever struck Enzo and the only time we see Denny drinking hard liquor automatically creates an association between Denny losing control and Denny drinking hard liquor. So when he pours the drink in Chapter 35 and Enzo barks at him, Denny faces a decision about whether he will give up or regain control of the situation. The situation easily fits into an analogy of a car losing control on a racetrack. By drinking, Denny overresponds to the situation exactly how his competitors (Maxwell and Trish) hope he will. So when he reappears at Zoë’s door and tells Enzo he put the alcohol away, it symbolizes his acceptance of the situation and his willingness to be patient and maintain control.
