A Complicated Kindness: Chapter Sixteen Summary & Analysis

Nomi is riding her bike down the highway when her pants catch in the chain and she falls. Normally she catches a ride with a farmer when this happens, but today Travis happens to drive by and picks her up. Travis says she should wear bike clips on her pants, and asks her if she’s on the Pill yet. Nomi says she will be in about two weeks. Nomi and Travis drive to a field, take off their clothes, and lie in the truck bed. Travis suggests that they move to Paris, where he can write and Nomi can learn to bake bread. He says than can save up for airplane tickets, but Nomi points out that neither of them have jobs. Suddenly they see a tractor approaching, so Travis rolls Nomi up in a carpet and drives away.

Travis pulls up to The Comb’s trailer and helps Nomi get dressed and pull carpet fluff out of her hair. She thinks he is very sweet. They sing a Roy Orbison song and vow to name their first son after the singer. For a while they sit around sniffing purple gas out of a container near the trailer, but suddenly Travis asks what would happen if they broke up and Nomi stops talking to him. She feels like she always wrecks beautiful moments.

Nomi and Travis see The Comb inside his trailer, but they don’t have any money to buy weed. Nomi suggests they trade the carpet for drugs, so they drag it up to the door and Travis convinces The Comb that it’s a valuable object. While he takes it inside, The Comb kisses Nomi on the mouth and says he saw her getting dressed by the gas tank.

On the way home, Travis tells Nomi that he once asked his mother whether she loved God or his father more, and his mother answered God. When they arrive at Nomi’s house, they listen to the radio in the car for a while. Nomi muses that music “is the glue of our relationship,” but Travis tells her to be quiet because he can’t hear. Nomi gets out of the car without kissing him goodbye. That night, it rains outside. Nomi says she can hear it through the screen and feel it on her face, “and it was warm, but it wasn’t rain.”

In the morning, Nomi checks herself for bite marks and gets ready for school in the dusty kitchen. The neighbor girl knocks on the door and asks Nomi to play charades with her, and although it makes her late she plays a couple rounds. On the way to school, Nomi sees a group of young boys throwing rocks at construction workers building a new slaughterhouse. Suddenly, the construction workers run out of the building, throwing rocks back at the kids. They run away, but one boy gets hit and falls down. Nomi runs over to help him. Some of the construction workers join her, and tell the boy that he should learn not to throw rocks. Nomi offers to take him to school; she learns that he’s a recent immigrant from a Mennonite settlement in Paraguay, and gives him a cigarette.

Nomi is kicked out of typing class “for flippancy.” She’s distracted by thinking about her phone call with Travis before school. He’s acting cranky, and she tells him that he should just apologize for being mean the night before and admit that he loves her “more than life itself.” Nomi hangs up, but five minutes later she calls him back and apologizes.

In the afternoon, the guidance counselor calls Nomi to her office and asks what she wants to do with her life. Nomi says she’d like to be a city planner, but the counselor reminds her that this career would require “exceptional math skills.” She asks why Nomi is having so many problems with her English assignments; Nomi insists that she hands them in, but that  Mr. Quiring doesn’t like them. The guidance counselor hugs her.

Nomi has a gynecologist appointment after school, but she stops by the general store first and buys Ray a plastic bird that can drink water. Back on the street, she sees a toddler walking around with a doll stroller strapped to her rear end, so she can sit down whenever she gets tired. Nomi admires her resourcefulness. The doctor’s waiting room is full of Hutterites, members of a related religious sect. Nomi prays to move to New York and convert her grief into hit songs.

The doctor asks Nomi if her father knows that she’s getting on the Pill; bluffing, she says that he does. The Mouth regularly criticizes this doctor in church because he provides the women with birth control if they don’t want to have kids. The doctor also prescribes antidepressants, and has written that East Village has a disproportionate number of mentally ill people because of the culture of “sin, shame, death, fear, punishment, and silence.” The Mouth says this is “fiction.”

The doctor asks Nomi about her medical history and gives her the birth control. Nomi reflects that even her deep longing to escape to New York would probably be a joke in the outside world. People would treat her as a premise for a comedy.