The Glass Castle: Part 3 Summary & Analysis

The family soon realizes that the “Piggy Bank Special,” an Oldsmobile, is not even worth the two hundred dollars paid for it. It breaks down several times, and never can get above twenty miles an hour.

They sleep in the car every night for the month it takes to cross the country, and one morning wake up to Oklahomans laughing at them. Jeannette hides under a blanket and refuses to come out, leading Mom to admonish her to enjoy life’s comedies a bit more.

By late November, they reach West Virginia, where Jeannette notices that the air feels heavier and darker. They arrive in Welch, a valley flanked by wooden and brick buildings perched precariously on the hills.

They arrive at a large but battered house and are welcomed by a pale, obese woman with a cigarette in her mouth—she is Dad’s mother. Jeannette calls her Grandma but she snaps at her to call her Erma.

Next to Erma a fragile-looking man with white hair, Ted, tells Jeannette it’s fine if she calls him Grandpa. Redheaded Uncle Stanley, smelling like whiskey, hugs and kisses the kids over and over again. Jeannette wonders if this is one of Dad’s pranks, and the real family is somewhere else, but Dad isn’t smiling and looks uncomfortable.

The family eats overcooked, salty beans together and descends to the basement, a large room with one bed, a pullout couch, and a coal stove. All the kids climb into bed, tickling and teasing each other until hearing a “thump” from upstairs. Mom goes up to investigate: Erma says they’re making too much noise.

Jeannette doubts that Erma likes them, but Mom says that she’s had a difficult life, and that they’ll adapt.

The next day, Jeannette sees Uncle Stanley listening to the radio, on which they hear someone speaking in tongues, and then a preacher speaking in a “hillbilly” accent asking for donations. Dad claims this is what turned him into an atheist.

Mom and Dad take the kids for a tour and tell them about Welch’s history. Unfit for agriculture, it was only developed in the early 20th century, as robber barons brought in laborers to work the coal mines.

There’s a river named the Tug, but Dad says that they can’t go fishing or swimming, since the Tug serves as the catch-all for the town’s sewage system—there’s even toilet paper in the branches at the banks.

The main road has a grand courthouse and a bank with arched windows, but by this point it’s run-down. Dad says it’s been this way since the fifties, when JFK came to Welch to hand out the first food stamps and prove abject poverty did exist in America.

Mom agrees that things have grown shabbier since she was last in Welch after she and Dad were first married, but cheers up when she realizes there probably aren’t any other artists to compete with her.

The next day the kids go to Welch Elementary, where Mom tries to convince the principal that the kids are gifted. The principal asks Jeannette eight times seven in such a thick accent that she doesn’t understand—and he can’t understand her answers. He decides the children have learning disabilities and places them in a classroom for slower children.

Jeannette arrives for her first day in an old coat with the buttons torn off, and the other kids whisper about her at recess. Her classes are filled with rote memorization of West Virginia’s counties and videos of the high school’s football games.

In English, Jeannette’s teacher goads the students into making fun of Jeannette for thinking she’s too special to bring in school records. The class laughs at her, and a tall black girl with almond eyes jabs a pencil into her back.

Jeannette lingers in the cafeteria, eating alone, until the janitor nudges her outside to recess. The tall black girl from class, along with two of her friends, make fun of her for having no buttons on her coat, and start kicking and shoving her, which she takes without fighting back.

At home, Jeannette deflects Mom and Dad’s questions about school rather than face Mom’s optimistic responses to whatever she tells them. Dinitia Hewitt, the leader from the first day, and her sidekicks gang up on Jeannette every day after lunch and call her poor, ugly, and dirty—none of which Jeannette can really refute.

Jeannette finally tells Mom only that girls are making fun of her for being poor, and Mom says to tell them that Abraham Lincoln was from a poor family and that Martin Luther King would be ashamed. She tried these tactics, but the girls laugh and just continue.

A month into school, Jeannette is wandering in a park and sees a wild dog approaching a small black child, who seems about to run. She yells at him not to, but he dashes towards the trees. Jeannette can tell that this dog might be wild but is more scary than truly evil, and she scares him away by raising a stick at him.

Jeannette carries the boy piggyback to a neighborhood with brightly painted houses. She drops him off at a neat but small house and, turning around, sees Dinitia looking at her from across the street.

The next day, Dinitia stops bullying Jeanette, and the others soon lose interest. Though she never apologizes, Dinitia does ask Jeannette for homework help. She goes to Dinitia’s house that Saturday—or to “Niggerville,” as Uncle Stanley calls it.

That afternoon, Erma asks how “Niggerville” went. She blames blacks for Welch’s deterioration, and says they are the reason she refuses to leave the house.

Jeannette tells her not to use that word, and that Mom says black people are just like us. Erma curses at Jeannette and sends her down to the basement without dinner.

Lori congratulates Jeannette on standing up to Erma, but Mom says that they have to remember to be polite while they’re Erma’s guests—confusing Jeannette, who hasn’t heard Mom talk that way before.

Mom says Erma’s parents died when she was young and she bounced around between relatives, essentially as a servant. She says everyone has one good thing in them. When Jeannette asks if that applies to Hitler, Mom immediately responds that he loved dogs.

That winter, Mom and Dad decide to drive back to Phoenix to pick up the bikes, school records, and other things left in the house. Mom leaves Lori in charge and tells the kids to listen to Erma.

Jeannette envies Mom and Dad for returning to Phoenix, where she remembers riding her bike, eating free bananas, and studying at a place where the teachers considered her smart.

Brian and Jeannette wonder aloud if Mom and Dad will return. The kids know that they are more inconvenient to their parents now that they’re older and can no longer sleep in cardboard boxes or cling to the sides of U-Haul trucks.

A week later, the kids are all watching TV in the living room when Erma tells Brian to follow her into Grandpa’s bedroom, where she can sew up his shorts while he’s still wearing them. Jeannette follows them into the bedroom and sees Erma squeezing at Brian’s crotch while he cries and resists.

Jeannette yells at Erma to stop and calls her a pervert. Lori runs in and tells everyone to calm down, but Erma slaps her and the two get into a fight.

Erma sends the kids down to stay in the basement, where they can’t use the bathroom and can eat only the beans Uncle Stanley sneaks down to them.

A week later, a foot of snow falls on Welch. Since Erma won’t give the kids any coal to burn, they all climb into bed every day after school to do their homework together and keep warm.

The night Mom and Dad come back, the kids hear the door open upstairs and Erma begin to complain about all the trouble they’ve caused. Dad heads downstairs to yell at them for not being proper guests. Jeannette thinks he’ll understand when she explains, but Dad only says that Brian can take anything, as a man.

Afterwards, Jeannette and her siblings wonder why Dad was acting so strange. Jeannette asks aloud if Erma might ever have acted towards Dad as she did with Brian—it would explain a lot, she thinks. But Lori tells her not to think about it, or she’ll go crazy.

Mom and Dad tell the kids that they arrived in Phoenix to find the house looted, with everything gone. They took a few things back, but the Oldsmobile finally died in Nashville, and they abandoned it.

Erma claims she can never forgive the kids and they can no longer stay with her. The family can’t afford a rental in Welch proper, but Mom and Dad find a place over one of the mountains and up a one-lane road called Little Hobart Street. The houses here are shabbier than the ones in the valley, but their new home is the shabbiest of all: gray and drab, it juts out from the hillside, perched on rickety cinder-block pillars.

The house has three small rooms and no indoor plumbing—the family doesn’t have money for electricity either. But Mom concentrates on the beauty of the cast-iron coal stove—even though there’s no chimney and the ceiling is coated with soot.

Dad, for his part, says that this is just a temporary solution, providing a plot of land to build the Glass Castle. It’ll take him a little while to adapt the solar cells, given that where the house is located, barely any sun will reach it.

The family moves that day. One room becomes the master bedroom, living room, and artist studio, while another is the kids’ room with homemade plywood bunk beds, and the third the kitchen. The kitchen has gnarled electric wires everywhere. Whenever they can afford electricity, which is rarely, anyone who touches a surface in that room gets a severe electric shock.

Still committed to the adventure of it, Mom tries to teach Lori and Jeannette how to use the house’s sewing machine to make dresses, though they turn out baggy and unfitted; she also covers the house’s walls with her paintings until there are several layers of the paintings, which she rotates every so often.

One day Jeannette asks Dad if they are ever going home—when he asks “Home?” she responds, “Phoenix.” Dad replies that this is home now.

Jeannette and Brian decide to embrace this new home by beginning to dig the foundation for the Glass Castle during all their free time. After a month, the foundation is deeper than they are tall.

One day, Dad tells Jeannette and Brian to dump the house’s garbage in the pit, since they haven’t been able to pay the trash collection fee. He says it’s a temporary measure until he can hire a truck to move it. But he never does, and the foundation begins to fill up with trash.

The garbage also attracts rats, one of whom Jeannette discovers “bathing” in the sugar bowl. When Brian throws a skillet at the rat, it hisses at them and they run away. That night Maureen is too afraid to sleep, and to reassure her that she is “surrendering to fear,” Jeannette turns on the light—only to find the rat on her blanket.

Their dog, Tinkle (a stray that had followed Brian home) catches the rat and kills it. Mom says she’s sorry for the dead rat and names it Rufus, while Brian hangs it from a tree by the house to scare off other rats. Their next-door neighbor, Mr. Freeman, mistaking the hanging dead rat for a possum, shoots at it and blows it away.

Jeannette, Brian, and Lori begin to sleep with makeshift weapons by their heads, while Maureen spends nights at other friends’ houses.

Mom doesn’t seem worried about what the neighbors will think about the garbage or cleanliness, but Jeannette tries to think up ways to improve the house, like painting it yellow with paint Dad brought home from an odd job.

The rest of the family is unenthusiastic about this idea, so Jeannette embarks alone, until she has completed all the sections of the house that she can reach without a ladder. She spends a few days trying to build one, but by that time the paint freezes and then melts into lumpy, runny liquid. Now the house is even worse—a “patch job,” a job left half done.

Jeannette’s family is the poorest on Little Hobart Street, but Mom and Dad never accept welfare, food stamps, or church drive clothes, saying they can take care of their own family.

Jeannette is friendly with the oldest of the six Hall children who live nearby: 42-year-old Kenny, who, like all of his siblings, is mentally challenged and lives at home. The other kids tease Kenny about having a crush on Jeannette, and she has to let him down by explaining she doesn’t date older men.

Mom and Dad always tell the kids they don’t have it as bad as some—for instance the Pastors, the nine children of the town whore, Ginnie Sue Pastor. Ginnie Sue spends her time working like any mom and dresses like any mom instead of lounging around like the women at the Green Lantern.

The oldest Pastor daughter, Kathy, wants to be Jeannette’s friend, and invites her over so that she can tell Ginnie Sue about her family’s time in California. Jeannette agrees since she’s curious about what it’s like to be a prostitute (she’s figured out what happens at the Green Lantern). She thinks up questions to ask Ginnie Sue.

When she visits, Ginnie Sue asks Jeannette to help her pick apart a chicken, and Ginnie Sue and Kathy marvel at Jeannette’s thoroughness.

Jeannette tells the two of them about California and Las Vegas, exaggerating her proximity to showgirls, casinos, and air-conditioned hotels and restaurants.

On her way home, Jeannette realizes she hadn’t asked any of her questions—she had even forgotten Ginnie Sue was a prostitute. Thinking about it, she decides that prostitution does at least put food on the table, she decides.

Fighting is common in Welch, perhaps because of the poverty or lack of activities. The Wall kids join in, usually fighting as a team. Their proudest victory is the “Battle of Little Hobart Street,” against Ernie Goad. It starts when Ernie begins throwing rocks at Jeannette and Brian for “stinking up” the town. He yells that they’re garbage—they even live in it. Jeannette has to admit it’s true.

One weekend, Ernie throws a rock through the window and yells that they’re garbage before running away. Brian cooks up a plan to make a catapult with a mattress and ropes like the medieval ones in their library books —enough to kill Ernie and his friends, they think. When Ernie’s gang returns, Brian gives the signal and he and Jeannette catapult the mattress lined with rocks into the air, hurling them into the group of kids and chasing them away screaming.

As winter turns to spring, life in Welch becomes slightly more manageable. Longer days mean more light to read by, for instance.

Mom reads in bed and apologizes for not being productive by saying that reading is one of her own addictions.

Lori is the family’s biggest reader, and enjoys fantasy and science fiction. Jeannette prefers books about the hardships of this world rather than another: her favorites are The Grapes of Wrath, Lord of the Flies, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. The last encourages her to believe in her father like that book’s protagonist believed in hers, despite his drinking.

One night Dad comes home with deep, bloody cuts on his head and arm. Mom is asleep and Dad asks Jeannette to sew up his arm. She feels like she’s sewing meat, and tells him she can’t do it. Dad guides her fingers until they’ve completed a few stitches, and Dad tells Jeannette he’s proud of her. That evening, when Jeannette returns home, he’s left again—increasingly a common event.

Though Dad can usually get odd jobs, he prefers to search for a way to hit a windfall, by figuring out how to burn coal more efficiently, for instance. Jeannette tries to be supportive but finds it increasingly difficult to believe in him.

Sometimes, Mom receives checks from the drilling company on her land in Texas, though she is always vague about this. She refuses to sell the land, as it’s part of her family—every few months, though, she receives a check and they eat well for days.

At school, Jeannette hides in the bathroom during lunch so that the other kids don’t make fun of her for “forgetting” to bring her lunch, and later picks through the garbage for the uneaten food the other kids throw out.

Maureen is the only sibling to have a stable food source, since she rotates among her friends’ houses for dinner. But Jeannette notices Mom is getting heavier, and one day Brian finds her eating a giant Hershey bar under the covers. Mom starts crying and calling herself a sugar addict, and says they should forgive her like they forgive Dad for his addiction. Without saying anything, Brian breaks the bar into four pieces and the kids gobble them up.

As winter arrives in Welch, Jeannette begins to feel ill. She wears only a thin wool coat, and the family can’t afford coal for heating. She and Brian occasionally collect coal pieces that have fallen off trucks, but usually concentrate on finding dry wood. Mom claims that life is easier for them than it was for the pioneers who lacked all modern conveniences.

When it gets warmer and the snow starts to melt, it becomes difficult to find dry wood. One day Lori uses kerosene as an aid (against Dad’s wishes, since he says it’s dangerous and unnatural) and it explodes, singeing her thighs so that she can’t sleep under blankets—though it’s too cold to do without them.

One day Jeannette goes to her friend Carrie Mae’s house to work on a school project. When Carrie Mae’s dad shows Jeannette how their thermostat works; she first thinks he’s joking. For several nights after that she dreams that her family has a furnace that can be turned on with a lever just like her friend’s.

At the end of their second Welch winter, Erma dies. She had long prepared for her funeral and leaves detailed, intricate instructions. Jeannette is surprised at how upset Dad seems—she’d assumed he’d feel relieved.

When Mom asks if the kids have something nice to say about Erma, Lori responds, “Ding-dong, the witch is dead.” The others start laughing, but Dad looks furious and yells at the kids, saying that he is ashamed of them.

Four days later Mom sends Jeannette to find Dad, who still hasn’t come home. She moves from bar to bar and finally finds him at the dark, grimy Howdy House with the other regulars.

Dad orders Jeannette Cokes as he continues drinking whiskey, until he is stumbling so much that a man offers to drive them home. When she tells the man she wants to be either a veterinarian or a geologist, he tells her she has “big plans” for being the daughter of a drunk. He means it as a compliment, he says, but Jeannette refuses to say another word.

Not long after Erma’s death, Uncle Stanley falls asleep while smoking a cigarette in the basement, and a fire breaks out. Though he and Grandpa escape, the house burns down. They move into an apartment with a working bathroom, giving the kids a chance to take a weekly bath.

One time, when Jeannette goes over to take a bath, she feels Uncle Stanley’s hand easing its way onto her thigh as he touches himself. She tells Mom on him, but Mom says he’s just lonely, and that sexual assault is a “crime of perception.” Jeannette, however, refuses to go back even to take a bath.

That spring, heavy rains flood the Tug river and spread mud into the houses; 126 people die from a landslide by a mine. According to Mom, this is nature’s revenge for man “pillaging” and building upon the land.

The house is consistently damp, sprouting mold and mushrooms. Mom gets bruised by falling through a rotted step. She jokes that her husband doesn’t beat her—he just hasn’t fixed the stairs.

One day, as Jeannette and Brian are exploring, they find a diamond ring, which Mom takes to be appraised. Though it turns out to be valuable, Mom decides to keep it to replace the one Dad had given her and then pawned. When Jeanette says that the ring could buy a lot of food, Mom responds that it can also bring “self-esteem,” which is more important.

Mom does seem to toggle between dark moods, when she yells at the kids for preventing her from becoming an artist, and cheerful periods, like when she decides to clean the house. Instead of ridding it of the clutter, though—like Jeannette wants to do—they end up just organizing the clutter into piles.

Jeannette takes advantage of one cheerful moment to broach a grand plan to Mom: that Mom should leave Dad in order to be eligible for welfare. Mom is shocked that Jeannette, Dad’s last defender, would abandon him, and claims that going on welfare would be psychologically damaging. She also refuses to get a job with a salary, again calling herself an “excitement addict.”

That summer, Dad still thinks of Jeannette as his biggest fan. One afternoon as they’re sitting on the porch he points down at the valley houses, the ones nearly swept away by flooding. He put lots of thought into their home, he tells her jokingly—real estate is all about location. They each start laughing uncontrollably and can’t get themselves to stop.

To get away from the heat, Brian and Jeannette go to the public swimming pool, until the day Ernie Goad tells everyone that the Walls kids make the pool smell, since they live in garbage. The two quietly leave, with Ernie triumphant about his revenge.

Later that week Jeannette runs into Dinitia Hewitt, who invites her to go swimming with “us” in the morning. “Us” means black people, who only swim in the morning despite the lack of official segregation. Jeannette gets a few curious looks as she enters the locker room, but soon feels confident enough to joke with the other women there. She swims and plays in the water with Dinitia all morning, feeling cleaner than she has in ages.

That afternoon, a man with a folder under his arm knocks on the door to Jeannette’s house saying he’s from child welfare, and asking for Rex or Rose Mary Walls. He says he’s received a call about possible neglect at the house.

Jeannette claims she’s not neglected, and that her parents do work—her dad as an “entrepreneur” developing coal efficiency technology, and her mom as an artist and teacher. She tells him to come back later before she can answer any more questions and she accepts his card.

Angry and fuming, Jeannette runs outside to throw rocks from the hill, and worries about how she’ll be unable to fight off the child welfare man like she’d fought off Ernie Goad.

Though Jeannette had initially assumed Welch was one more, brief stop, Mom and Dad seem to have lost their desire to move around. They talk vaguely about Australia and Alaska, but their plans never translate into action.

When Jeannette gives Mom the child welfare man’s card, Mom grows quiet instead of being self-righteously angry like Jeannette. While Mom paints a picture of a woman drowning in a lake, she tells Jeannette brusquely that she’ll just get a job.

With her teaching certificate, Mom gets a job teaching remedial reading within a week, and the family hurries to clean the house—though the welfare man never returns.

Mom can’t get along with Lucy Jo Rose, a fellow teacher who drives her to work and thinks that “Jackson Pollock” is a derogatory term for Polish people. Several times a month she refuses to go to work, until the kids cajole her into going.

For the first time in awhile, though, the family can pay all the bills and buy food and a fridge. Although there are hundreds of dollars left over with each paycheck after the bills are paid, the money never lasts the month and the food always runs out by the end.

Mom claims that it’s difficult to make ends meet with four kids and an alcoholic husband, but Lori and Jeannette draw up a budget as if they were in charge of the money, with generous cuts for Mom’s extravagances, which would still allow for new clothes and coal for heating and other necessities.

That fall Jeannette starts seventh grade at Welch High School. Though Dinitia is there, she spends most of her time with the other black girls, though the two do pass notes in study hall.

Dinitia also starts drinking at school, and has trouble with her mother’s new boyfriend. She passes one note to Jeannette one study hall in December revealing that she’s pregnant. When she doesn’t return to school, Jeannette goes to her house and asks for her, but the door is shut in her face. Jeanette later finds out that Dinitia has been arrested for stabbing and killing her mother’s boyfriend.

Romantic relationships begin to be the main point of conversation for girls at school. Jeannette doesn’t trust boys, but wishes one would like her even though she’s tall, gangly, and pale with red hair and protruding teeth.

Jeannette has never been to the dentist, and while she initially decides to save up for braces with money she earns babysitting, she is shocked to learn from a classmate that they’re twelve hundred dollars—four years of babysitting.

She decides to take matters into her own hands, tying a rubber band across her upper teeth, wrapping larger ones around her entire head, and eventually holding them in place with a metal coat hanger. One night Dad comes in and surprises her as she is wearing her contraption. He marvels at her engineering chops.

Seventh grade is also when Jeannette begins to work for The Maroon Wave, the school newspaper, where she can fit in and meet people without having to pay for uniforms or equipment. Miss Jeanette Bivens, the organizer, was also Dad’s beloved English teacher who, he says, was the first person to believe in him. He named Jeanette after her.

In the evenings, Jeannette proofreads at the offices of The Welch Daily News, where the Wave is printed, and draws on her experience proofreading Mom’s essays and her students’ homework. She adores setting the type, making corrections, and carefully pasting the lines of the type together.

Jeannette also enjoys watching the reporters and editors at work, as they send journalists out to find out information about something on the police scanner. She realizes that being a writer doesn’t have to mean being isolated like Mom—instead a writer can be intimately acquainted with the world, and “know what was really going on.” Jeannette decides that this is what she wants to do.

Jeannette sometimes feels badly about not taking care of Maureen, so that year, she, Brian, and Lori save for months to buy Maureen a toy kitchen set at the dollar store. On her birthday, Maureen asks as usual to hear about life in California, and says that’s where she’ll live when she grows up.

Maureen does, though, seem happier than the other children, with her beautiful face and many friends whose Pentecostal families take her under their wing. Maureen does, however, start to talk about the devil visiting her and following her around. While Brian wonders if they should keep Maureen away from the Pentecostals, Mom says that religion is individual and each person has to figure out his or her own way.

Though at times like these, Jeannette thinks Mom is incredibly wise, Mom’s moods are also becoming more intense and extreme. Near the end of the school year, her negative thoughts completely take over after she’s spent time painting when she should have written her students’ progress evaluations, without which the remedial program will lose its funding.

Lori tries to console Mom as she sobs under the covers, but Jeannette looks on, feeling scornful about her mother’s childish behavior. She swears that she will not end up like her mother by the time she’s thirty-eight, Mom’s age now.

Lori, though, feels sorry for Mom for being married to Dad. When Jeannette says that Mom needs to be stronger, Lori says that not even a caryatid (ancient Greek pillars shaped like women that support the temples on its their heads) would be strong enough.

That summer, Mom leaves for Charleston to take college courses for her teaching certificate. Lori is heading to a state-sponsored summer camp, so Mom leaves Jeannette with two hundred dollars, giving her an opportunity to prove that Dad just needs a strong woman to manage him.

The first week, Jeannette sticks to her budget and organizes the house, which has again become a mess.

The next week, Dad comes home one afternoon and asks for money for beer and cigarettes—five dollars, or two days’ worth of food. Jeannette finds herself unable to say no, but feels used.

Dad asks for five dollars again a few days afterward, and then twenty, claiming he needs gas to borrow a friend’s car for a meeting. Jeannette feels increasingly desperate, and when Dad asks if he’s ever let her down, Jeannette is about to tell him the truth. But she can’t manage to, and she gives him the money.

That weekend, Dad tells Jeannette to accompany him on a business trip to pay back that money. He picks out a nice dress for her and drives her to a dark, run-down roadside bar. Dad leaves her at a bar to play pool, and a mustachioed man named Robbie asks Jeannette to dance and flirts with her.

Though Jeannette expects Dad will be furious once he realizes what’s happening, he seems nonchalant and simply yells over to Robbie to join him in pool. After a few hours, Robbie is drunk and on a losing streak—Dad gets eighty dollars on him.

Robbie invites Jeannette upstairs to listen to a Roy Acuff record and dance. Jeannette is worried about his intentions, but when Robbie asks Dad he says, “Sure,” and at Jeannette, “Holler if you need me.”

Upstairs, Robbie dances with Jeannette but then starts groping and kissing her. Jeannette is too mad at Dad to want to scream for him to rescue her. Robbie mentions how bony she is and Jeannette adds that she has some scars, unbuttoning her dress at the waist to show him. As Robbie pauses, she escapes downstairs.

Afterward, Dad gives Jeannette forty of the dollars he’s won, and though Jeannette is seething, she accepts the money since she knows they need it. Dad asks her if she’s upset about something, and Jeannette tells him Robbie attacked her upstairs. “I knew you could handle yourself,” Dad replies, comparing this to the time he threw her into the water to teach her how to swim.

A few days later, Dad asks Jeannette to come with him to another bar, and when she refuses, he demands another twenty dollars, which she gives him. Jeannette knows a check is coming from Mom’s Texas land, but Dad beats her to it by waiting for the postman. Dad suggests they hide it together in the encyclopedia, but the next day when Jeannette goes to find another hiding place for it, it’s gone.

Jeannette finally realizes that standing up to Dad is more difficult than she’d thought. She applies for a part-time job at a store called Becker’s Jewel Box, telling Mr. Becker she’s seventeen rather than thirteen, and is hired for forty dollars a week.

Jeannette enjoys the work at the store since anyone buying jewelry is happy, despite Welch’s poverty. But it annoys her when Mr. Becker takes the key to the diamond display case with him when he leaves for lunch, and carefully counts each ring upon his return.

Jeannette is particularly attracted to the watches, which actually serve a purpose and stands for someone’s need to be places. Jeannette dreams about taking one of the watches for herself.

One day, an employee from another of Mr. Becker’s stores stops by and, in conversation, Jeannette learns the other woman makes a commission of ten per cent of every sale. When Jeannette asks Mr. Becker why she doesn’t get a commission, he says that as an assistant she’s not eligible for commissions.

The next day Jeannette slips into the watch display case, which Mr. Becker doesn’t see a need to keep locked, and slides a watch she likes it into her purse. She tries it on in her bunk bed at night.

But since she’s worried about being seen with the watch on, Jeannette decides to only wear it at home—but then wonders how to explain it to her family. Mr. Becker might even be able to tell she’s done something wrong by her attitude, she thinks, and since she can’t lie well she’ll become a juvenile delinquent. The next week she slips the watch back into the display case.

At the end of August, Lori returns from camp bursting with stories about the friends, food, and songs of her summer. It’s the first time she’s realized, she tells Jeannette, that she could have a happy, normal life.

Mom returns from her summer, where she adored living without responsibilities, committed to concentrating on herself rather than others by quitting teaching and working on her art. She asks Jeannette why she should be the one earning money, and says that Jeannette and Lori can get jobs.

The first day of school, Mom refuses to leave with Lucy Jo, and when Jeannette’s cajoling doesn’t work, Jeannette says that to be treated like a mother Mom should act like one.

Mom tells Dad when he returns home that Jeannette back-talked her, and Dad admonishes her for not respecting her parents. Jeannette repeats that neither of them is acting like parents, and when Dad threatens to beat her with his belt if she doesn’t apologize, she refuses. He whips her on the back of her thighs six times.

Jeannette races outside and into the woods, where she throws up. She wanders for hours through the trees until she’s made two decisions: first, that she will never allow anyone to whip her like that again; and second, that she would follow Lori in escaping from Welch and their family.

Jeannette buys a plastic piggy bank and puts the seventy-five dollars she’s earned at her job that summer into it, beginning her escape fund.

That fall at school, two New York filmmakers, Ken Fink and Bob Gross, arrive in Welch as part of a government cultural program. Despite their funny names, Jeannette is awed by their clever, complex humor and the symbolist foreign films they show. After one showing, Lori shows them her illustrations and they say that New York City is the place to be if she really wants to pursue art.

New York also appeals to Lori as a place where it won’t matter that she’s different, wearing army boots and polka-dot dresses rather than jeans and T-shirts and creating Gothic-style paintings late into the night.

Jeannette offers to make her escape fund a joint fund, and she and Lori name the piggy bank Oz. Lori starts to paint commissioned posters for Welch High students to hang on their walls. Jeannette babysits and does other kids’ homework, guaranteeing them at least an A-. Brian, though too young to imagine leaving with his sisters, pitches in by mowing lawns and cutting weeds.

The money in Oz is safe, since there’s no plugged hole at the bottom and the slot at the top is too thin to extract the money.

One day that winter, Jeannette arrives home to find a Cadillac Coupe DeVille outside their house, which Dad has won at a poker game. Jeannette knows Dad should sell the car to pay for clothes, food, and electricity, but he wouldn’t think of it. Jeannette, too, comes to love the car, which they name “Elvis.”

Mom uses the car to drive to craft fairs and try to sell some of her paintings. When the family accompanies her, they sleep in the car, and Jeannette remembers how easy it used to be to stay on the move.

As Lori’s graduation from high school approaches, she has fears for her future in New York—the escape plan has never fully included what she’ll do once she gets there. She initially thinks she’ll get a college scholarship and is a National Merit Scholarship finalist, but she has to hitchhike to Bluefield to take the test. The trucker she gets a ride with tries to seduce her and she is unnerved enough that she doesn’t do well on the test.

Lori then puts together a portfolio for the Cooper Union art school, but spills coffee on it just before it’s due. She hears about a scholarship for the best work of art inspired by a literary genius, and decides to make a clay bust of Shakespeare.

Dad thinks Shakespeare is a fraud, since no one person could have had his vocabulary, and that instead his plays were written by a group of people. As Dad is explaining this to Lori, he reaches over to the sculpture and wipes off the mouth, renaming it the Mute Bard. Lori is devastated but Dad says she’s thinking like a “sheep.”

Jeannette says that Lori should still go to New York, get a job, and save up until she can apply to school.

Dad sulks since the entire family is upset with him, and wonders aloud why Lori would even want to go to a dirty sinkhole like New York.

One May evening, Jeannette returns to her bedroom to put a few babysitting dollars into Oz, and finds him slashed open on the floor, with all the money gone.

Jeannette wonders desperately if she can quickly make back the nine months’ worth of money that they have saved, but when she goes into the living room, Lori can tell from her face that something is wrong. She runs into the bedroom and starts whimpering rather than screaming.

Dad doesn’t come home for three days, and when he does he seems nonchalant despite Lori’s and Jeannette’s fury. He throws a few dollars at them. Jeannette asks him why he’s doing this to them, and his face grows angry, but he stumbles to the sofa and passes out. Lori says she’ll never leave, but Jeannette reassures Lori that she will—it’s the only way to know she, Jeanette, will be able to leave too.

The next day Jeannette buys a change purse, which she wears under her clothes, and then hides in a hole in the wall in the house.

They have made only $37.20 by the summer, when one of Jeannette’s babysitting families offers to take her to Iowa to take care of their two children for the summer, and then pay for her ticket back to Welch. Jeannette tells the mother, Mrs. Sanders, to take Lori instead, and to buy her a return ticket to New York City rather than Welch.

The day Lori leaves, she refuses to say a word to Dad, but hugs the rest of the family and leaves without looking back. Dad says that the family is falling apart, and Jeannette agrees.

Now in the tenth grade, Jeannette becomes the news editor of The Maroon Wave, and enjoys attending school events since she now has an excuse to be there alone.

Jeannette spends her lunch hour writing and editing, giving her an excuse for why she doesn’t eat lunch, and an opportunity to find the industrial-sized cans left in the cafeteria garbage.

Jeannette gets the editor-in-chief job as a junior and sells newspapers in the hallways. She only reaches a small percentage of the school, even though she tries creating poetry competitions and a fashion column. One day, someone tells her that the same names always appear in the newspaper. She establishes a “Birthday Corner” and circulation doubles, though Miss Bivens wonders if this counts as serious journalism.

That year, Chuck Yeager, the first pilot to break the sound barrier and one of Dad’s heroes, comes to give a speech at Welch High. Dad is thrilled and helps Jeannette think up all kinds of questions, since Yeager has agreed to let her interview him. Dad stays up late teaching Jeannette all about aviation history and aerodynamics.

Chuck Yeager holds the entire school in thrall, and later allows Jeannette to interview him for almost an hour. During the interview she mentions the airplanes he’s flown in that she learned about from Dad, and Yeager calls her an expert. For a brief moment, the other kids at school all compete to talk to her, asking her about the interview.

In New York, Lori is working as a waitress at a German Restaurant, taking classes, and loving how art and music are everywhere. Jeannette counts down the months until she can join her.

Jeannette has decided to enroll in a city college in New York and apply for a job at the wire services AP or UPI, becoming one of the important writers the people at The Welch Daily News joke about.

When Jeannette goes to see Miss Katona, the college guidance counselor, she advises Jeannette to apply to college in-state, since it’ll be cheaper. Jeannette proposes to move to New York for senior year so that she’ll be in-state there, but Miss Katona counsels her against it because of all that she’ll miss—the prom and Senior Day. Jeannette is skeptical that she’ll miss much, and thinks seriously about leaving after junior year. She races home and again notices her unfinished paint job, recalling how nothing she’s done to improve their lot in Welch has worked.

When Jeannette tells her parents her plan, Dad walks out without saying anything. Mom encourages her to go to New York, but seems about to cry. She says it’s not fair that Jeannette gets to leave and she’s stuck in Welch.

Lori offers Jeannette a place in her apartment, and Brian starts counting down the months, as Jeannette had done with Lori. Dad, on the other hand, barely speaks to Jeannette anymore.

One evening, though, he asks Jeannette to take a look at something with him. He spreads the blueprints for the Glass Castle, which they haven’t mentioned since they started filling up the foundation with trash, on the living room table. He tells Jeannette he’s redoing the layout so that her room will be bigger, and shows her his intricate diagrams and measurements.

Jeannette tells Dad that he’ll never build the Glass Castle, and that even if he does she’ll be gone.

Dad suggests that Jeannette can stay in Welch and get a job at The Welch Daily News while he works on the Glass Castle.

Jeannette tells him that there’s no way she’s staying put, and if he builds the Glass Castle it shouldn’t be for her. Dad walks out with his blueprints without saying a word.

At the end of May, Jeannette is feeling increasingly scared. She says goodbye to Miss Bivens, who assures her that she’ll be alright but wonders aloud who will serve as editor of the newspaper—she thinks she might try to convince Brian.

As Jeannette packs, she decides to leave everything from the past behind, even her geode, which she gives to Maureen.

Jeannette leaves on the seven-ten morning bus, so Mom, who likes to sleep in, doesn’t wake up to see her off. But Dad is there to carry her suitcase, and gives her his favorite jackknife before she departs. He tells her she can always come home if she needs to, but Jeannette knows she never will.

As Jeannette looks out the window at Dad, she wonders if he had left Welch at 17 thinking he’d never come back either.