58 pages • 1 hour read
Philip BeardDear Zoe
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2004A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 17-19Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 17 Summary: “My Dad”
In the first two weeks staying with her dad, Tess realizes he spends most of his day doing “the kind of nothing that can fill up your whole day” (82). He doesn’t really work but spends time with his family, or fixes something in his mother’s house, or goes to the gym. He drives Tess to school every morning and picks her and Em up at Em’s school. Tess can tell Em is starting to like her dad. Tess’s grades are improving at her dad’s, even though David was always the one to ask her about her homework. At night, Tess checks in with her mom on the phone, and her mom apologizes about Justin, but Tess says that’s not the reason she left. Sometimes her dad receives phone calls, or people come to the door, but her dad turns them away. Tess says when she was little, her dad always had a girlfriend, but no girlfriend comes by in the first few weeks.
Tess notes her dad keeps the wedding picture of him and her mom on his dresser. In it, they both look extremely young, not so different from Tess’s friends. She doesn’t understand why he has it and says, “The only thing I can think of is it’s a picture of one of the only really important days of his life and he needs to be reminded that he once did something that was worth doing, even if it didn’t work out so great” (87).
Chapter 18 Summary: “Soul Man”
Tess spends a lot of time on her dad’s porch with Frank, watching Jimmy Freeze go in and out of his house many times a day. He doesn’t acknowledge her, no matter what she wears, and that makes her think he’s even cuter, much to her own frustration. To get his attention, she sings James Taylor one day, and he stops and talks to her. Tess learns that Jimmy lost his license and sort of knows her father, whom he calls Nunz, because his truck is recognizable. Tess tells Jimmy she’s almost 16 and that she knows her body looks younger. Jimmy tells Tess he’s not a “boob man,” but an “eyes man.” He sings a few bars of “Soul Man” and tells Tess she doesn’t need to wear so much makeup. Tess offers him a beer, but when she goes inside to get it, her dad stops her. He tells her she’s not allowed to hang out with Jimmy. When Tess returns, Jimmy says he heard her dad and confirms which room in the house is Tess’s before leaving. Tess drinks some of the beer, and her dad doesn’t stop her.
Chapter 19 Summary: “Travis”
Tess notes Jimmy is right about her dad’s truck being recognizable. Strangers wave to them when they see the truck. Tess realizes he’s dealing drugs from the back of the truck when a man named Travis drops off a roll of $20 bills one day after school. Travis, whom Tess describes as “really creepy,” says he’s an old friend of Tess’s mother and father’s and that he’s probably even seen Tess naked a few times. He asks if Tess ever gets to “sample the product” (97), and she pretends she doesn’t understand, though by that point she does. Tess’s dad comes home and sees Travis, realizing Tess understands he’s dealing drugs, and Tess asks if he’s scared. Her father says he’s doing it for the money and says he’s a “shitty father,” and Tess says he’d be a “shitty father” from prison. He assures Tess he’s only dealing a little weed, and the fight ends with dinner. Later that week, Tess passes Travis on the sidewalk and sees he has a black eye.
Chapters 17-19 Analysis
While Tess’s dad may be a “screw up,” the environment he provides is comfortable for Tess, allowing her a greater measure of independence and space away from her mother and David. Tess says she doesn’t know why she gets ready faster at her dad’s, without acknowledging that she no longer gets Em ready for school. At her dad’s, Tess is able to step outside her maternal role and into the role of a more traditional teenager. While traditional parental oversight might be lacking at her father’s house, the environment appears far from unsafe and is rather one of domestic intimacy, in which Tess and her father watch movies, cook, and spend time with the dogs. Nevertheless, the persistent phone calls and knocks on the door create an undercurrent of instability to life at her father’s house.
By an academic metric, Tess improves while she stays with her father. Counterintuitively, her father does not remind her to do her homework in the same way David does, so Tess begins to hold herself accountable in a new, mature way. As a character, Tess’s father is revealed as deeper and more complex by virtue of keeping the photograph of his wedding to Tess’s mother. Tess questions his motivations for keeping the photograph, demonstrating sophisticated emotional intelligence when she guesses reasons as to why he might be keeping it.
Tess’s relationship deepens with Jimmy in Chapter 18, “Soul Man,” starting with her lamentation that he never acknowledges her existence, revealing Tess’s desire to be seen and her desire to connect. Jimmy tells Tess she needs less makeup, and Tess says that when she puts on makeup, she “feel[s] like [she’s] making a different person” (92). Her use of the word “make” is significant here, suggestive of artists; through makeup, Tess doesn’t merely hide but reconstructs her whole identity. While Jimmy’s rendition of “Soul Man” is humorous, it also reveals that Tess and Jimmy will connect on a deeper level. Tess offers Jimmy a beer, eager to seem sophisticated, but her father asserts his authority by telling Tess she cannot spend time with him. After Jimmy leaves, Tess sips the beer in a small act of rebellion and assertion of personal agency.
The undercurrent of instability takes on shape and weight when Travis appears on Tess’s father’s porch and Tess learns that her father deals drugs, further establishing his character as occupying a moral gray area. Tess feels she should have realized this sooner, and her self-recrimination is consistent with her character throughout the novel: She often blames herself for not having realized things sooner, much as she blames herself for Zoe’s death. Tess disagrees with her father’s claim that he is a “shitty father,” though she counters that he would be one from prison, implying the risk her father assumes in dealing drugs is damaging enough to destroy their relationship. Just as Tess takes on a great deal of responsibility in her relationship with Em, mothering her and preparing her for school, she also takes on a great deal of responsibility in this conversation with her father, using humor to urge him to stop dealing drugs and make the more mature decision. Travis reappears with a black eye, the implication being that Tess’s father punched him, but the violence happens offstage, further complicating Tess’s father as a character: He is not above violence, though the actual act is not described.
