58 pages • 1 hour read
Dear Zoe
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Chapters 11-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11 Summary: “Justin”
Tess’s mother briefly takes medication that makes her foggy, forgetful, and irritable. Tess spends more time with Em, putting her to bed at night while David takes her to school in the morning, which is their routine until Tess leaves to live with her dad.
Tess tells a story that happened in May, four months before Zoe’s accident. In the story, Zoe is almost three and Tess, Zoe, and her mom go to Marsico’s, a nearby grocery store. A young guy named Justin works there, and Zoe loves him because he gives her lollipops. At the store, Mrs. Marsico tells Tess’s mom she’s going to get Justin, and her mother blushes. Tess notes that her mother is very beautiful, while Tess is physically built more like her dad. Tess’s friends comment on how beautiful her mother is, which Tess finds annoying, but then she begins to enjoy the effect her mother has on her guy friends because it’s fun to watch them blush. Justin acts like Tess’s friends do around her mom, but he also takes Zoe behind the counter and plays a game with her as he writes down the items in their charge account. Justin and her mother are mildly flirtatious with each other. Tess notices that her mom enjoys the warmth from Justin.
Tess finds the encounter a bit strange because her mom met David in a grocery store while David was choosing cantaloupe, which Tess loved as a child. Tess notes the odd thing about being a stepchild is that you can watch your parents fall in love, but as you get older, you realize people can fall out of love.
Tess notes that eight months after Zoe died, more items from Marsico’s grocery store appeared in their kitchen. When Tess goes to the store, Justin gives her an envelope with “Elly” written on it (Tess’s mother’s name) and says it is the bill for their charge account. Tess gives her mother the envelope at home, but her mother says it’s nothing and rips it up. Tess tells her that she thinks it’s great because she didn’t think her mother “gave a shit about anyone anymore” (49). Tess’s mother tells her, “you can’t always get comfort from people who have the same pain you have” and starts to cry (49). Tess isn’t sure what happened between her mother and Justin, but she decides there is no comfort in their house, and she goes to move in with her dad.
Chapter 12 Summary: “The Truck”
Tess says she and her dad used to go to the Kennywood amusement park when she was little. She and her dad would stay all day and night, riding the rides, and then she would sleep late in the morning.
Tess tells a story about her father taking her to Disney World. He gets tickets for free from a friend, and they drive down in his brother’s pickup. She is in second grade, and it’s the longest she’s been with him. The park is so crowded and the lines are so long she can hardly ride anything, and her dad gets angry. At dinner, the park becomes even more crowded because of a nightly parade, and Tess’s Dad tries to take her on the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ride, but some kids in wheelchairs skip the line and Tess’s dad decides to leave without going on the ride. The next day, her dad puts Tess in a wheelchair, and they spend the next week riding all the rides and not having to wait.
Tess still believes her father has a little bit of these “powers,” but he picks her up from school in a crumbling old mail truck. Tess is surprised by how rough her father’s neighborhood seems, with cramped houses with rusted awnings, cracked sidewalks, and old smokestacks. There is a new litter of German Shepherd puppies, and the dog smell is worse than Tess remembered.
Tess calls her mother and tells her she’s staying with her dad because they’re all like “ghosts in our own house” (67). Tess’s mother cries. One puppy has white fur over his eyes, and Tess decides she likes him best and calls him Frank.
Chapter 13 Summary: “Church”
Tess sleeps most of Saturday. Her dad, who loves to cook, makes breakfast and broccoli cheddar soup. They play with the dogs and watch movies. On Sunday they go to church.
Tess’s father is Catholic, and she used go to mass on Sundays after sleeping over on Saturdays. Her mother grew up Methodist but joined David’s Episcopal church, where Em and Zoe were baptized. Tess thinks the main difference between the religions is that the Episcopal Church has far more money. The Catholic Church is much stricter, and Tess finds the churches themselves depressing. She mentions that five friends of hers from the Lake were in a car accident a few months before Zoe died, and one of the kids died. The memorial service was depressing, and Tess was such a mess that her mom had to “practically carry me out of there” (63).
At church, Tess and her father meet up with Tess’s grandmother, Gram, and Tess’s great-grandmother, Mo Mo. Zoe never met her Gram, but Tess feels she would have liked her because she’s soft. In church, Tess feels better sitting between Gram and Dad. She hasn’t been since Zoe died, and for a moment, it is nice to imagine thinking of Zoe “somewhere safe and beautiful” (65). Tess stays in the pew with Mo Mo during Communion while her Dad and Gram go up, and she feels alone and starts missing Em.
The congregation sings “Let There Be Peace on Earth,” which they’ve sung every day since September 11. Tess starts to scream, “No! No!,” but no one can hear her because they’re singing so loudly, and finally Tess runs from the church.
Chapters 11-13 Analysis
Tess’s way of thinking is associative, and as a result the book often jumps back and forward in time depending on what Tess remembers at any given moment. The non-linear narrative zig-zags back and forth, much like a “Z,” which Tess says is the shape of Zoe’s life. In that way, the shape of the book mimics and reinforces the shape of Zoe’s life, taking unexpected twists and turns.
In “Justin,” this unexpected narrative twist takes the form of Tess’s memory of four months before the accident, when, without saying so explicitly, Tess reveals that her mother’s inappropriate relationship with Justin, and their possible affair, is the one of the reasons Tess left her mom and David’s house to go live with her father. Tess’s assertion that “People who fall in love can fall out of it” betrays a fear that her mother and David’s relationship might not last (47).
While the trajectory of the book is non-linear, its principal story is what happens when Tess goes to live with her father. Tess’s anecdote of her father’s and her trip to Disney World reveals her father as morally gray: He makes Tess sit in a wheelchair so they can cut the long lines for rides, but he does so for Tess’s benefit. Her father is capable of making Tess feel “famous and invisible at the same time” (54), a tension that Tess struggles with throughout the book. She both wants to be seen and understood and wants to remain hidden. Her hope is that by going to live her father he will find a way to “rescue [her], make [her] invisible again” (54). Tess’s father fails to ask her what’s going on, which Tess notes is “weird,” revealing an underlying desire to communicate and be seen by her father even as she wants to remain invisible.
Class and socioeconomic differences are apparent in these chapters, especially through Tess’s descriptions of her father’s neighborhood and her comparisons between the Catholic church and the Episcopal church. At the Catholic church with her family, Tess first feels comforted imaging Zoe in heaven, but her experience shifts when she begins to feel isolated and alone in the pews.
As a survivor of trauma, Tess has various triggers that cause her to re-experience the trauma of the day of Zoe’s death. The singing of the hymn and its connection to September 11 triggers a moment of panic for Tess, in which she yells and flees the church. Tess does not understand these moments as triggers or moments of post-traumatic stress, and does not interrogate them too deeply, preferring not to directly confront her memory of Zoe’s death on September 11.
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