Little Fires Everywhere: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

The narrative flashes back in time to the previous June. Mia Warren and her fifteen-year-old daughter Pearl have just moved into the Richardsons’ “little” rental property on Winslow Road. Mrs. Richardson and Mr. Richardson were aware when the two of them moved in that Mia was an unmarried single mother, but nevertheless she had paid her first month’s rent, last month’s rent, and security deposit up front and in cash.

Winslow Road is lined with duplexes, designed to appear to be single-family homes to “allow residents to avoid the stigma of living in a duplex.” The fact that each house is a duplex is common knowledge, but is only discernable from inside each structure.

Shaker Heights is governed by many unspoken ways and rules, often both strict and obscure. As Mia and Pearl settle in, they begin to learn the rules. They must write the word Up following their new address, so that their mail is delivered to them and not to the downstairs tenant, Mr. Yang. Each property has a “tree lawn,” a strip of grass which separates the sidewalk from the street. All throughout the city, garbage cans must be left in the rear of the house, never dragged out to the curb. Garages, too, are placed at the backs of properties in order to maintain a pleasant, streamlined appearance, and lawns must never be allowed to grow more than six inches tall, which the Warrens learn when Mr. Yang takes a trip to Hong Kong and leaves the lawn unmowed resulting in a “polite but stern letter from the city.”

Each house in Shaker Heights is built in either Tudor, English, or French style, and each style can only be painted one of a few certain colors. Shaker is one of the nation’s first planned communities, laid out in 1912, and the “underlying philosophy” of Shaker is that “everything [can] and should be planned out” in order to avoid “the unseemly, the unpleasant, and the disastrous.”

Along with the more stringent, off-putting rules, Mia and Pearl begin to learn the “more welcoming things” about their new neighborhood. They start to memorize local street names and become familiar with the local grocery store, where customers are treated “like aristocracy,” and bagboys deliver customers’ groceries to their cars free of charge and without accepting even a tip. On weekends, Mia and Pearl visit nearby neighborhoods with less stringent ordinances—neighborhoods where trash can be left at the curb—in order to collect free furniture to fill their new home.

Moody Richardson overhears his parents discussing whether or not Mia will pay the rent on time with some concern — she is, they know, a struggling artist—though they both concede that the rent is not important to the Richardson family’s well-being. Mrs. Richardson’s parents purchased the duplex as an investment property when she was young, and used the rent money it generated to help send her to college, then to help her get on her feet as a young professional, and finally to help her and Mr. Richardson to put a down payment on their own home.

Mrs. Richardson inherited her parents’ rental house after their deaths five years ago, and in addition to being a “sentimental memory,” most of the income generated from it is funneled into the Richardsons’ yearly vacation fund. Because the Richardsons do not need the money the house generates, Mrs. Richardson has the luxury of using it as a tool to “do good,” by picking the “kind of tenant” who is “deserving but who ha[s], for one reason or another, not quite gotten a fair shot in life.” Mr. Yang, who occupies the downstairs apartment, is one such tenant. An immigrant from Hong Kong and a bus driver for “a nearby private girls’ school” as well as a part-time handyman, Mr. Yang is “exactly the kind of tenant Mrs. Richardson want[s]: a kind person to whom she could do a kind turn, and who would appreciate her kindness.”

Mrs. Richardson has had less success with renting the upstairs apartment to the “kind” of tenant she wants—though her tenants have all been deserving, none of them have “stayed long.” Mrs. Richardson vowed to be “more careful” in choosing a tenant this time around, and settled on Mia and Pearl in part because she wanted Pearl, a bright girl in all AP and honors classes, to have a place in the pristine Shaker Heights school system—though Mia, as a renter, will “get all the benefits with none of the burden.”

Moody is intrigued by his mother’s mention of a young girl living in the rental house, and, a few days after Mia and Pearl move in, he rides his bike over to the property to introduce himself. He is the first of the Richardson children to “venture” to the house on Winslow. When Moody arrives, he watches as Pearl unpacks a bed frame from her mother’s car and arranges the pieces on the front lawn. Moody notes that Pearl’s hair is in a “thick braid straining to burst free.” Mia leans out of the second-story window and photographs Pearl lying playfully in the grass in the middle of the bed frame, and Moody watches the intimate moment unfold between them. When Mia goes back inside, Pearl calls across the street to Moody, asking if he wants to help them “or just stand there.” Moody doesn’t remember crossing the street or introducing himself to Pearl, and feels that “he ha[s] always known her name and she ha[s] always known his.”

Moody helps Pearl bring the bed frame inside and watches as she assembles it. Mia brings them a set of tools, and Pearl knows exactly what to do with each of them. In the Richardson house, if something breaks, his parents call a handyman or simply replace the broken thing. “Every three or four years,” Moody notes, his parents purchase a whole new living room set, move the old set into the basement, and donate the “old-old set” to a local shelter. Moody has only ever handled tools in shop class, where he made the same project as his brother before him and his sister before his brother. Moody asks where Pearl got the bed frame, and Pearl tells him that she and her mother “found it.” Moody is surprised when Pearl confesses that she has never had a house of her own before, let alone a room. Moody cannot “believe that people could be so poor.”

As Pearl recounts her and her mother’s itinerant lives and all the places they’ve lived, Moody can’t “see all that she [is] remembering.” Pearl and Mia have lived in dilapidated apartments in Urbana, Middlebury, Ocala, and Muncie, and had subletted a place in Ann Arbor where Pearl had played dress-up in the clothes of the “lucky girl” who normally occupied the home. Pearl now prefers totally empty apartments “to [ones] filled with someone else’s things.” Pearl tells Moody that she and her mother move whenever Mia “gets the bug.” Pearl says that this time, though, she and Mia are staying put.

Moody has the sudden realization that he is infatuated with Pearl, and that his life has been “divided into a before and an after.” He eagerly asks her what her plans are for the next day.