The Five People You Meet in Heaven: Chapter 20 Summary & Analysis

The narrator summarizes Eddie’s memories of his parents. As a young child, Eddie tried to get his father’s attention, but his father would either yell or ignore him. When he took Eddie out on Saturdays to Ruby Pier, he would find someone else to take care of Eddie while he drank and gambled. In contrast, Eddie’s mother was loving and protective. When Eddie got a bit older, his father habitually came home drunk late at night, went into Eddie and Joe’s room, and beat them with his belt, blaming his financial troubles on his kids. Eddie’s mother tried to stop him, but to no avail. Still, Eddie loved his father when he was young, because as the narrator says, “sons will adore their fathers even through the worst behavior.”

At rare times, however, Eddie’s father would give out small gestures of approval, and Eddie hungered for these moments, and eagerly sought them out. His father approved of Eddie when he played well in a baseball game, when he came home bloody from a fight and bragged that he was the winner, or when he defended his older brother from bullies. When Eddie was a teenager and he went to work with his father as a mechanic at Ruby Pier, his father would toss him broken equipment to fix. “It’s fixed,” Eddie would say, and his father would nod. Eddie’s father spoke proudly of his maintenance work, and would say that Eddie’s greasy mechanic’s fingernails showed an “honest day’s work.” Eddie grew used to his father’s lack of affection and learned to communicate wordlessly through these small rituals, not letting himself expect more.

The narrative now shows Eddie after he has come back from the war. He is in a deeply depressed state, and spends most of his time on his parents’ couch. One night his father come home drunk, and yells repeatedly at Eddie to “Get up and get a job!” When he tries to hit Eddie, Eddie reflexively lifts his arm against his father to block his father’s strike. After that night, Eddie’s father never speaks to him again—not even at Eddie’s own wedding a couple years later. Throughout his life, whenever his mother or anyone else pleaded with his father to speak to him, Eddie’s father told them that Eddie “raised a hand to him,” a fact which he cannot forgive. Now, in heaven, Eddie is again filled with anger and hurt by his father’s silence through the diner window.

A woman wearing a long skirt and a parasol speaks to Eddie outside of the diner, and introduces herself as his “third person.” She tells him his father isn’t really there in the diner, because they are in her heaven. Eddie is frustrated that he is meeting a stranger, when he thought heaven meant being reunited with those he’d lost in his life, and finding peace. The lady tells Eddie that he must “make peace” on his own, and Eddie feels overwhelmed at this task. He remembers the fish he used to see flopping hopelessly in nets at Ruby Pier, and thinks of himself like that—feeling trapped and hopeless for all of his life after the war.

The woman with the parasol tells Eddie that she knows him, even if he doesn’t know her. She then tells him her story. She was once a young, pretty waitress at that very diner, right by the sea. She rejected the advance of many visiting men, until one day, when a handsome, rich businessman came to her diner. This man—Emile—took her to beautiful sea resorts and bought her extravagant things. When he proposed to her, he promised he would make a beautiful sea park in dedication to his love for her. He poured his energy into the massive project, and a few years later, he brought her blindfolded to the entrance of Ruby Pier. The woman now introduces herself to Eddie as Ruby.