A Complicated Kindness

Nomi doesn’t want to go to bed when she gets home, so she walks downtown to the Trampoline House. While the family who owns it is away or asleep, people can drop a dime in the can and jump on the trampoline as long as they like. Nomi tries to think about her problems by putting them in categories like “Travis,” “school,” and “environment.” She remembers jumping on the trampoline with Tash years ago. Tash instructed Nomi authoritatively that if she liked a boy at school, she should ignore him.

Nomi leaves the Trampoline House and goes to school, where she is supposed to write a “fifteen-hundred-word story that included a triggering point, a climax, and a resolution.” She wants to write about Turkish weddings, but Mr. Quiring rejects the topic immediately. Frustrated, he asks why she isn’t more bothered when she receives her graded essays covered in red underlines. Nomi responds that she doesn’t mind because, in the Bible, the words of Jesus always appear in red. Mr. Quiring hits her with a pencil case and Nomi walks out of the school.

Nomi walks down Main Street. She waves to one of her mentally-handicapped cousins, who is sitting outside the supermarket, and sits at the post office with another mentally-handicapped cousin, Jakie, to watch a group of Hutterites emerging from a Land Rover. Nomi encourages Jakie to tell her the birthdays of everyone he knows. Then she walks by the church, where The Mouth has posted a fearsome Bible quote saying that God’s true followers “shall go forth, and look upon the carcasses of the men that have transgressed.”

In the supermarket window, Nomi sees a sign advertising a new meat department, so she goes inside to check it out. The butcher looks at her hopefully, but she doesn’t know anything about cooking cuts of meat. To avoid disappointing him, she asks for a pound of any kind of meat, and he gives her a roast to cook for her dad. Outside, some boys from school drive by and call her a “doob,” a local slang term for a condom. Nomi refrains from throwing the roast.

Nomi runs into two classmates, Marina and Patty, who are babysitting some young kids. They invite her back to the house for cake and vodka, but before the vodka appears Marina says that the parents are coming home soon and they should leave. A few minutes later, Nomi is standing at her kitchen window and sees Patty walking back towards the house. Nomi thinks that she really is a “doob.”

Ray comes in from watering the flowers and sees that Nomi has been crying. He asks her to accompany him to the town dump, which he visits often. He tells her to load the wood from her playhouse, which he’s recently dismantled, and an old bed frame into the car. Nomi reflects that Ray always comforts people in ridiculous ways. She remembers the time when Trudie had to identify her sister’s body after she was killed in a horse-and-buggy accident, and Ray told her not to “let it be an entirely negative experience.”

Nomi likes to see Ray driving because he looks in control of his life. She admits that she bought a roast and lost it on the way home, and Ray tells her not to worry about it. Even though people are supposed to pay to enter the dump, the owner lets Ray in for free; Ray confesses that this is because sometimes he visits the dump at night and organizes the garbage. They pile their trash in the dump and look around for interesting objects. Nomi sees a small cowboy boot that reminds her of her own days of riding horses. Ray used to take her to compete at rodeos, where he would be the only person dressed in a suit and tie.

Nomi knows that Ray wants to move the boot to a better place, so she teases him about organizing it until he picks it up and places it in a different pile for broken toys. Nomi reflects that for Ray, the dump is like a “cemetery where he could organize abandoned dreams and wrecked things into families, in a way, that stayed together.”