A Complicated Kindness: Chapter Twenty-Eight Summary & Analysis

Nomi announces that she is now the sole owner of her family’s car. Ray has even taken it to the car wash before disappearing. She wonders how he left without being able to drive. Nomi also has Tash’s records and stereo, a French horn, and an official document testifying to her ownership of the house. Ray has only taken his new suit, his plastic bird, and his Bible. He’s left a note telling Nomi how to sell the house and change the car’s oil. He says that he’ll give her a year or two to herself, but that she should remember Jesus’s words: “Lo, I am with you always.” He closes the note with a verse from Isaiah, saying that when she finds joy “the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you singing.”

Nomi sits in Ray’s lawn chair for a while, in case he comes back. She concludes that he has left so that he doesn’t have to shun his own excommunicated child. That’s what everyone in East Village has to do if they can neither disown the church nor live without it. Nomi starts loading things into the car, and the little neighbor girl comes outside to watch her. When Nomi has finished, she spins the little girl around until they both fall down. Finally, she feels that she can see everything in her life clearly, from the pits to Travis’s hands playing the guitar to The Mouth and her “windowless school.” Now that she knows she won’t encounter any of this anymore, it doesn’t seem so bad.

Nomi thinks that Menno Simons must have had a terrible childhood in order to think that excommunicating people and forcing their families to shun them was a good idea. She thinks about “the way things could have been,” which is the name she’s giving to this piece of writing, her final assignment. Addressing Mr. Quiring directly, she says that she’ll leave it on his front porch. She assumes he won’t like it, but he doesn’t need to give it back.

Speaking to Mr. Quiring, Nomi wonders why she still craves his approval so much. Perhaps because, like him, she’s fixated on Trudie. Nomi says that Mr. Quiring gave her family “an ending,” following his own rules about the unalterable structure of all stories.

Along with her assignment, Nomi is returning to him the last letter he wrote to Trudie. Unlike the previous letters about his “bottomless passion” for her, this letter is angry and harsh. In it, Mr. Quiring threatens to tell The Mouth that Trudie has been using Mrs. Klippenstein’s empty house to have adulterous relationships with several men. Since Trudie is widely believed to be “demented,” no one will believe her word over his. Nomi comments this isn’t a very good way to try to win someone back.

Nomi believes that Trudie began a relationship with Mr. Quiring out of grief, and returned to Ray out of love, both for him and for the idea of her family. Love is more powerful than grief, Nomi says, and people will do anything to “keep alive the love we’ve felt.” Mr. Quiring uses the church to keep his love alive, while Nomi lies in bed with her memories.

Nomi comes out of her reverie when the little neighbor girl rubs her bald head. Nomi quietly thanks Ray for knowing that, in order for Nomi to break away from East Village, he had to leave first. Nomi sends the neighbor girl home.

It occurs to Nomi that Trudie might have left town not reluctantly, to spare Ray the pain of shunning her, but exuberantly, to embrace all the possibilities of the outside world. Maybe she has never really loved Ray, or no longer loves him as much as the idea of being free. Perhaps she had an affair with Mr. Quiring out of frustration with Ray for keeping her in a community that was so harmful in her family.

The Mouth has suggested that Trudie killed herself after leaving town, “out of guilt and regret.” Nomi wonders if Trudie really is dead, or if she’s living quietly somewhere in Canada or has managed to leave the country without her passport. Perhaps Ray has killed himself as well. Nomi decides that she’s going to put her faith in the first version of the story, because it holds out the hope “of being reunited, of being happy again.” From living in East Village, she’s learned that it’s people’s choices in the stories they tell that matter the most; her town has given her “faith to believe in the possibility of a happy family reunion.”

Nomi leaves her favorite leather bracelet between the doors of Mrs. Peters’s house. She hopes that Mrs. Peters will find another way to keep Clayton alive in her imagination. Nomi lights a cigarette and drives away.

Actually, Nomi says to Mr. Quiring, she hasn’t quite left yet; she has to sell the house yet. Really, Nomi says, the story ends with her sitting on the floor of her room, wondering who she’ll be once she leaves town. She remembers being a kid and falling asleep listening to Tash and Trudie talking in the kitchen and Ray working in the yard, “making things beautiful right outside my window.”