A Complicated Kindness: Chapter Seventeen Summary & Analysis

After leaving the doctor’s office, Nomi goes to see Lids in the hospital. The mean nurse tells her that visiting hours have ended, but she slips into the room where Lids is sleeping and wakes her up by singing quietly. She shows Lids her birth control prescription and the bird she bought for Ray, both of which Lids admires. Lids tells Nomi that she heard the doctor refer to her parents as “holy roller shitsqueaks.”

Nomi offers to wash Lids’s hair; at first Lids declines, as she finds this process very painful. However, Nomi comes up with a plan to do it without removing Lids from the bed. Nomi sings while she washes, getting water all over the floor, and afterwards Lids is clean and smells good. Lids kisses Nomi goodbye, and Nomi remembers the days when they would walk halfway home from school together and kiss on both cheeks before splitting up. She leaves the hospital and smokes a cigarette.

Back home, Ray is sitting in a lawn chair in the driveway and looking at the highway. He tells Nomi that he’s planning on removing the badminton net and selling some of his tools. Then he asks Nomi if she’ll accompany him to buy a new suit. She wants to hold his hand but feels it would be “pathetic.” At Schlitzking Clothing, the tailor measures Ray while Nomi sits on the floor and secretively reads her birth control directions. Her geography teacher walks out of one of the dressing room and asks her opinion on the suit he’s trying. It’s “piss-yellow” and she hates it, but she says politely that it’s very practical. The tailor convinces Ray to buy matching socks for his suit.

On the way home, Ray says sadly that he’s a bad parent. Nomi assures him that he’s not, and sings the theme song from The Partridge Family to cheer him up. At home, she gives him the plastic bird, which he enjoys. Then he goes downstairs to watch Hymn Sing, a TV program in which a Mennonite choir performs sacred music. Nomi lights some of Tash’s incense and listens to Bob Marley.