Summary
Since the accident, Enzo’s health declines more rapidly than ever. He loses control of his bladder and his joints stiffen to the point where he can barely move anymore. One night, while he and Denny walk around their neighborhood through a strip of trendy bars and restaurants, they spot none other than Annika getting drinks with a friend at an outdoor table at Bauhaus Books and Coffee. Denny surprises Enzo by walking straight toward Annika and her friend. When Enzo refuses to budge, Denny explains to him that this is an opportunity to be kind to Annika and try to make her see the situation from his perspective; so they approach her table.
Denny greets Annika, who acts pleasantly surprised to see him. Denny asks her friend to stay at the table so she can witness that their encounter remains totally appropriate. Annika agrees to hear him out. Denny apologizes for sending her signals that week at the cabin. He admits that she is a very beautiful girl, but that a relationship between them would never have worked. He explains to her that if he is charged, he will have to register as a sex offender, and he will never be able to see his daughter grow up. He pleads with her to please stop this process so that he can have his daughter back. Denny’s pleas move Annika and her friend to tears. Denny says goodbye and he and Enzo head home, thinking they may have gotten through to her.
That same week Denny's parents come to visit him at his apartment. His parents are old and dressed humbly in ratty clothes. At first, they speak very few words to Denny and act coldly toward him. He shows them to his room (he offers to sleep on the couch). One of the days they are in town, Denny brings Zoë to the apartment and his mother, who is blind, spends a long time touching Zoë’s face and weeping on the couch.
On the last day of their visit, Denny’s father hands him an envelope full of money. He tells Denny that they put a reverse mortgage on their family farm. Denny’s father admits that they never helped Denny out in any way, and he hopes that this offering will rectify that. Then, just as quickly as they came, they are gone again, back to the farm.
Enzo goes on another one of his metaphorical rants about how racing and life are closely related. He talks about the dangers of overcorrecting and the virtue of accepting one’s fate without panicking. He suggests that sometimes the better option is to accept finishing behind a few other drivers than to drive too hard and crash.
The story of Denny’s parents remains unexplained until his friend Mike interrogates him about them. So Denny tells them the real story. His mother suffers from a degenerative eye disease which caused her to go blind when he was a kid. When he finished high school, Denny’s father told him that if he left the farm and did not help care for his mother, that he should not bother keeping in touch with them. Denny tried calling for many years, but his parents refused to speak to him. Eventually, his mother started to answer the phone on Christmas day and listen to Denny tell her about his life.
Over the years, Denny has lied about his parents’ contribution to his life. They never actually offered sponsorship money for his races—that was money he raised himself, or, with Eve’s encouragement, by mortgaging their home. Finally, more recently, Denny called his mother begging her for a financial lifeline so that he could keep his daughter. His mother said that if she could meet Zoë, she would give him everything they could spare.
Analysis
Stein paces the novel quickly but subtly, so although time passes in broad swipes with months and years going by between some chapters, the reading experience remains fluid. Stein accomplishes this partly by way of the retrospective first-person perspective: since he establishes Enzo’s present state at the very beginning of the novel, the reader knows everything that happens between the beginning and end will ultimately lead up to the moment of truth when Enzo stages his own incontinence in order to be euthanized.
Another way Stein accomplishes the passing of time is by demonstrating the way certain characters age, particularly Zoë, Enzo, and Annika. Zoë’s aging marks the obvious passing of time because she grows from an infant to an articulate grade-schooler with emotional maturity beyond her years. Enzo grows from a puppy to an ailing old dog. And now, in Chapter 51, Annika represents just how long Denny has been mired in legal battles—almost three years have passed since she tried to seduce him at the age of 15. Now, we see her sitting on the sidewalk table of a café, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, obviously having aged into almost an adult.
The scene also represents how Annika’s life has gone on unaffected by the hardships she inflicted on Denny all those years ago. When Denny pleads with her to free him from these legal battles and let him keep his daughter, Annika acts confused, as if she had been manipulated by the adults in her family to believe that she was not doing as much harm as she actually was. The scene shows Annika’s lack of awareness of the consequences of her actions. But now, as an adult, she may be able to empathize with Denny on her own terms.
This chapter also further heroizes Denny for the way he decides to engage Annika with kindness rather than anger for the suffering she put him through. He follows the age-old mantra, kill them with kindness, in the hopes that she can see him for a good person and be compelled to do the right thing.
Enzo briefly alludes to Denny’s parents at the beginning of the novel, but then they go unmentioned until Chapter 52 and 53, when they visit Denny. Stein uses Denny’s parents as a deus ex machina, meaning they have very little bearing on the rest of the story, but they serve the very specific purpose of showing up to resolve a major problem in the plot. In this case, the problem is that Denny has completely run out of money. They put a reverse mortgage on Denny’s childhood home in order to provide him with a sizeable cash injection.
Their appearance also provides some background about Denny’s early life and retroactively fills in some of the omitted plot details from earlier in the novel. For example, Denny had said that his parents provided some of his sponsorship money for early races, but that turns out not to have been true. Instead, he took out a second mortgage on his home in Central Seattle at the encouragement of Eve. This detail posthumously endears Eve to the reader and concurrently feeds into the narrative of Denny as a dreamer who will stop at nothing to fulfill his passion for racing.
