A Complicated Kindness: Chapter Twenty Summary & Analysis

When Nomi and Ray return home, they find a bullet hole in the house’s picture window. A policeman comes to survey the scene and says that kids have been messing around with BB guns lately. When things like this happened, Ray becomes energetic and almost decisive. He’s cheerful even while stepping on broken glass in the living room and even cleans up the house a little. When Nomi makes him a TV dinner he compliments her on her cooking. Nomi feels like he’s pretending to be “an idiot dad” and she’s just acting like a “rebellious teenager,” when really they’re “two mental patients just getting through another day.” She decides to go out.

Nomi remembers that after Tash left, she started having nightmares about her sister burning in hell. When she woke up, she would find Trudie reading in the living room and ask if Tash was going to hell; Trudie would give vague responses like, “it won’t come to that, I’m sure.” When Nomi demanded the truth, Trudie said she didn’t know. Trudie quit her library job and started taking care of old Mrs. Klippenstein, who had sores on her leg that needed daily treatment. Nomi often accompanied her, and listened to Mrs. Klippenstein’s tales of her childhood in Russia and her marriage to a man who was eventually excommunicated. Trudie started spending a lot of time at Mrs. Klippenstein’s house.

The Mouth often came to Nomi’s house to pray with her parents. Both he and Nomi were shocked to find out that Tash had become an atheist, but it turned out Trudie had known for months, even before Tash left, and didn’t care. Nomi blamed Tash’s library card.

In the present day, Travis tells Nomi that he’s planning to move to Montreal. He says that she can come with him, find a cheap flat, and work as a life drawing model. Nomi says that she refuses to go because he used the word “flat,” and stalks back to her house, where Ray is sitting in front of the bullet-shattered window working on a watercolor painting. She goes inside and takes some of Tash’s Valium.

Inside, Nomi sees that the dining-room table is gone. Ray explains that he has sold it, along with the freezer, in which he found the frozen body of Tash’s old cat, Blackula. It died in the winter, and Tash left home before she could bury him in the spring. Ray digs a grave for the cat, and Nomi tries to make a cross, although she’s too high on Valium do so well. Finally she gives up and watches Ray work. She enjoys being outside in the grass under the darkening sky, listening as her father makes corny jokes and smelling stubble fires from far away.

After Ray finishes the grave, he leaves Nomi lying outside. After a while, she goes inside, puts on a record, and decides to razor her bangs, because Travis doesn’t like her hair that way. Then she puts on Tash’s sweatshirt and walks down to Main Street. She imagines Tash complimenting her hair and asking why she’s stolen her sweatshirt. In her mind, Tash says that she split up with Ian long ago and asks why Nomi is out here all alone if she has a boyfriend. Nomi walks home. As she’s sitting in the garage smoking a cigarette, a corner of the garage roof unexpectedly collapses.