46 pages • 1 hour read
For One More Day
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Prologue-Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue-Part 1: “Midnight”
Prologue Summary
The narrator describes meeting Chick when she comes to the town of Pepperville Beach, to sell a family home. She notices him sitting on the bleachers of a Little League field, and a passerby tells her Chick’s story: after making it to the World Series, Chick tried to kill himself. The narrator explains that she intends to tell the story that Chick told her that morning. She asks the reader: “Have you ever lost someone you love and wanted one more conversation, one more chance to make up for the time when you thought you would be here forever? [...] What if you got it back?” (8).
Chapter 1 Summary: "Chick’s Story"
Chick briefly narrates his life story up to his suicide attempt. His tone is weary and somewhat hostile: “Let me guess. You want to know why I tried to kill myself” (9). Chick believes that other people see him as a sort of cautionary tale, but that they don’t really understand; according to him, all anyone has is “life, how you mess it up, and who is there to save you. Or who isn’t” (9).
Chick explains that his mother has died ten years before. His mother’s love and support are the key to his self-esteem: “Mothers support certain illusions about their children, and one of my illusions was that I liked who I was, because she did. When she passed away, so did that idea” (10). Struggling with the end of his baseball career and the pressures of family life, on top of grief at his mother’s death, Chick reveals he drank heavily and was unable to keep a job. Soon after, his wife divorced him. According to Chick, she “grew tired of my misery, and I can’t say I blame her” (10). The last straw is the letter he receives from his daughter telling him about her wedding, which he was not invited to. He realizes he has lost all semblance of a family life: “through my drinking, depression, and generally bad behavior, I had become too great an embarrassment to risk at a family function” (11). As the realization sinks in, Chick decides life is no longer worth living.
Chapter 2 Summary: "Chick Tries to End It All"
After a two-day drinking binge, Chick leaves his sales job, determined to kill himself. He calls his ex-wife, demanding to know why he wasn’t invited to the wedding. He stops at a bar, and then drives to Pepperville Beach, his hometown, bringing a gun with him: “I was going to end my life where I began it. Blundering back to God. Simple as that” (14). This narrative thread in the chapter is literally and physically interrupted by an announcement of Chick’s birth, taken from his personal papers.
After stopping to buy more beer, Chick falls into a drunken stupor and misses his exit. Feeling he has nothing to lose, he turns the car around in the same lane and drives up an entrance ramp. He collides with a truck and his car is thrown off the road. He manages to get out of the car and then quickly loses consciousness.
When he wakes up, he looks up toward the road and sees the damaged truck. He has no memory of the accident, and fears that he has killed the truck driver with his recklessness. Though he knows that he should face the consequences of his actions, “courage was not my strong suit at [that] moment” (17). He instead begins to walk south, toward Pepperville Beach. By dawn, he reaches his hometown on foot.
On the outskirts of town, he comes to a water tower that he climbed with his friends as a teenager. He climbs up to the top, and catches sight of the baseball field where he played as a child. The sight calls up painful memories, and he jumps off the tower. He wakes up in the baseball field, injured but alive. There, on the field, is his mother, who has died ten years before.
Prologue-Chapter 2 Analysis
The first chapters of the book delve into the inner monologue of the main character, Chick. These chapters give the reader a sense of his voice - clear, reflective, and honest, if sometimes emotionally hyperbolic. Chick feels he has been unable to build a meaningful life for himself as an adult, and this intensifies his regrets about earlier life decisions. When the story begins, Chick has been searching for a way to make sense of his recent past, and has pinpointed his mother’s death as the moment when things began to go wrong. Here, as elsewhere, storytelling plays many roles; it is the narrator’s stated project to allow Chick to tell his own story through her, and it is an important ritual for the book’s characters as they strengthen bonds and heal wounds.
This narrative strategy of layered storytelling introduces an ambiguity: though the narrator is careful to say that the story is told in “Chick’s voice,” the reader is separated from the episodes Chick describes by several factors. First, time functions as a mode of separation: full decades have passed between many of the recounted events of Chick’s life. Second, there is the fact the reader learns of these memories not first-hand, through Chick, but rather through a narrator functioning as stand-in for Chick. Finally, there is the question of how reliable a narrator Chick—and the narrator telling Chick’s story—can possibly be, due to how Chick’s memories of difficult periods in his life have been changed by more recent events. For One More Day combines first-person narration with other narrative techniques to tell its story, and the first chapters of the book introduce the reader to these important structural elements.
At the same time, the theme of memory and return to origins is introduced in these chapters. As Chick returns to the place of his childhood, he is repeatedly confronted by memories, some more painful than others. Memory is not only internal; it interacts with Chick’s environment, and the smallest detail can call up an episode from the past that colors Chick’s experiences. By the end of these chapters, both Chick and his mother have traveled through time and space to meet somewhere between life and death.
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