A Complicated Kindness: Chapter Twenty-Three Summary & Analysis

Nomi reveals that Trudie left home because she was excommunicated from the community by The Mouth. Nomi doesn’t even know how she feels about this. She remembers Trudie sitting by her bed afterward, smiling “the same kind of real smile that Tash had smiled just before she left.” Trudie cried for a little while and then left the room. The next morning, Ray was looking dully out of the picture window and Trudie had left. Ray doesn’t say much about what has happened, and Nomi doesn’t even think that he blames The Mouth. She remembers what Mr. Quiring has said: that ideologies, not individuals, are responsible for most problems.

A month after Trudie’s departure, Nomi was walking by the Mennonite nursing home and saw Mrs. Klippenstein sitting outside in a wheelchair. She told Nomi despondently that she was living there now. Nomi wondered where Trudie had been going almost every other night, if not to take care of Mrs. Klippenstein at her house. She tried to ask Mrs. Klippenstein how long she’d lived at the nursing home, but the old woman didn’t respond. A few weeks after that, Nomi was folding Ray’s laundry and putting it away. She opened a drawer and found Trudie’s passport and some letters from Mr. Quiring.

Nomi walks home from the museum village to find Ray asleep in his lawn chair with a photo album. She checks the mileage on his car and finds that he’s driven almost 300 miles that afternoon. She brings him a blanket and goes inside. Under the note she left him that morning she writes another question, asking why Trudie didn’t take her when she left.

When Nomi wakes up in the morning, Ray is sitting at her bedside. He says that a storm has caused a lot of damage in town overnight. He leaves for work and Nomi goes downstairs, where she finds he has written a note to himself that says, “develop a new life strategy.” Ray calls from work to remind Nomi that she should go to school because she might want a high school degree in the future. Nomi asks why he’s selling all the furniture, and he says he likes empty spaces “because you can imagine what might go in them someday.” Nomi says that she’s never going to leave him. When he hangs up, she sees that he’s written an answer to her question from the day before: that Trudie didn’t take her because Nomi was sleeping when she left.

Nomi thinks that Trudie didn’t take her because Trudie knew Ray needed company more than she did. She also thinks that Trudie left town so that Ray didn’t have to choose between his wife and his community. It would be impossible for him to “publicly denounce” the love of his life, but equally difficult to turn away from the church that will assure their salvation in the afterlife. Nomi feels that, like her, Ray is “stuck in the middle of a story with no good ending.”

While Nomi gets ready for school she thinks about a job she once had at the town daycare. She loved hanging out with the little kids, but eventually got fired for teaching them to dance to The Beatles. At school, there’s a baseball tournament; Nomi stands in the outfield so she doesn’t have to participate. In the afternoon, the class goes swimming at a slimy dam that makes a perfect slide. There are hot dogs and popsicles, and some of Nomi’s classmates are crying out of sadness that high school is almost over. Nomi goes home and sits in her living room near the shattered window, remembering when Tash explained the concept of an erection to her.