Salvage the Bones: The Second Day: Hidden Eggs Summary & Analysis

The morning after the birth, Esch is awakened by the sound of hammering in the yard. She goes outside to find Skeetah building a kennel for the puppies—though they’re too little for it now, he says, they’ll need it in six weeks. Skeetah asks Esch if she wants to see the puppies, and then leads her into the shed. The puppies are no longer slick and squirming; instead they look fluffy and downy, almost like chicks. They roll and tumble over one another as they move towards China. Skeetah remarks reverently how lucky he is to have five puppies; it being China’s first litter, he expected that all but one or two would die. Esch, too hungry to focus on the “miracle” of the puppies, asks Skeetah if he wants breakfast, but he insists on getting back to work on the kennel.

Esch wanders around the Pit looking for eggs. Her mother taught her how to find eggs when she was a girl. Now, whenever she goes looking for the eggs hidden by the twenty or thirty hens that roam the pit, Esch imagines her mother is just ahead of her. Though she enjoys hunting for eggs, it is still work; the only thing that has ever come to Esch easily is sex. She lost her virginity at twelve to Marquise, Skeetah’s closest friend. The act came naturally to her and felt simple as swimming, and every time she has slept with a different boy since has been easy and effortless.

Esch, having gathered up several chicken eggs, heads inside to make breakfast. Junior, though, complains he doesn’t want to eat scrambled eggs again, and he insists on eating ramen noodles. Esch cooks up some eggs and brings them to Skeetah instead, and they head back into the shed to check on the puppies. Skeetah gives his eggs to China, and pulls one of the puppies away from where it is nursing to show it to Esch. At the sight of China’s swollen nipples, Esch runs outside of the shed and throws up into the dirt. Skeetah follows her and rubs her back in the same soft, slow way he touches China.

Later, out in the yard, Daddy gets Big Henry—whose name is due to his size and the fact that he looks to be in his mid-twenties despite being just eighteen. Daddy gives him a beer out of the six-pack he’s just bought and he jokes with Big Henry about women while Big Henry pretends to be interested and amused. Esch and Big Henry make eye contact, and she thinks about how kind he’s always been to her, since she was a little girl. Lately she’d begun to assume that he’d one day come to her for sex, but he never has. Skeetah comes up to Esch, Big Henry, and Daddy and asks Esch and Big Henry if they’ll come with him to town to get dog food, and the three of them pile into Big Henry’s car.

At the grocery store in the next town over, the parking lot is full and the store is busy with people buying up supplies in preparation for the hurricane. Skeetah doesn’t even look at any canned food or water jugs and instead goes straight for the dog food. He picks a giant bag of an expensive brand and then heads for the checkout. Waiting in line, Esch can feel a pregnancy test she’s shoplifted inside the waistband of her shorts.

On the drive back home, Esch thinks about how watching China give birth made her realize that she herself could be pregnant. She has missed her period two months in a row and has a heavy feeling in her stomach—not to mention the fact that she’s started vomiting every other day. Esch, lost in thought, looks out the window and sees a woman lying in the road.

As Skeetah gets closer to the woman, he sees that she has been in a car accident. There is a car in a ditch at the side of the road, and a man, bleeding from the head, pacing back and forth. Big Henry rolls down his window and asks if the two of them need help. The man reveals that he has a cell phone and has called 911, but has no idea where he is. He passes Skeetah the phone and asks him to tell the police their exact location. Skeetah is too stunned to take the phone, though, so Big Henry accepts the call and offers the police their location.

When he passes the phone back to the man, Big Henry tells Skeetah and Esch that the police have asked them to stay until help arrives. Skeetah is anxious to get home, though, and tend to China and the puppies. Big Henry gets out of the car to go help the man and the woman, and as Esch observes the man holding his hands in his head and looking down at the body of his wife, she thinks of Greek myth. In stories of ancient Greek lovers “there is never a meeting in the middle.”

Esch asks Skeetah if he thinks the accident victims are family members or friends, and Skeetah replies that he thinks they must be lovers. The answer surprises Esch; she wonders what Skeetah knows about lovers. Suddenly, the man from the accident approaches the car and tells Skeetah he looks familiar. Skeetah insists he doesn’t know the man, and calls Big Henry over to get him away from the car. Big Henry calms the man and walks him back over to where the woman’s body lies, but the man won’t even look at it. Twenty minutes later, an ambulance arrives; the woman has not moved once the whole time.

Big Henry drops Esch and Skeetah back at the Pit. As Esch gets out of the car, she notices that Big Henry has the man from the accident’s blood on his hands, and urges him to get out of the car and wash his hands under the spigot on the side of the house. Esch, meanwhile, heads inside and takes the pregnancy test; it is positive. She is pregnant. She sits in the tub and presses her eyes into her knees as the “terrible truth of what [she is now]” washes over her.