40 pages • 1 hour read
Mrs. Fletcher
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Parts 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4: “The MILF”-Part 5: “Lucky Day”
Chapter 13 Summary: “That Happened”
The narrative skips forward to early in the New Year, when Amanda has served her notice at the Senior Center and found another job. Although she and Eve act like everything is okay on the surface; they both know that Amanda left because of the awkwardness following the threesome at Eve’s house. The attraction between them proved to be short-lived, because it had faded by the time of the tipsy kiss in Eve’s office at the Christmas party.
Eve blames herself and her own loneliness for the threesome and takes responsibility for it because she is older than the other participants. Going back to the night of the party, Brendan arrived home when Amanda had gone, but Julian was sleeping naked in his bed, a roll of condoms at his side. Eve had made some excuse about Julian hooking up with a girl from their Gender and Society class.
That night, Brendan insists that he is quitting college, without ever giving her a “convincing explanation” (235). Both Brendan’s guidance advisor and his father, Ted, support his decision to drop out. Brendan bursts into tears, fearing that he has disappointed them, and he and Eve drive back to campus to pick up his stuff.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Somebody Loves Me”
Eve is left alone on Valentine’s day after Brendan goes for pizza with a former varsity player, Chris Mancuso. Since Brendan’s return, Eve’s life has shrunk, and she has given up her class at Eastern Community College, because she deems it more appropriate that Brendan should be taking classes there instead. Eve is still watching MILF pornography, but finding that her libido has ebbed. Late into the night she receives some text messages from Julian, telling her how desirable he finds her, and she is suddenly turned on again.
At pizza with Chris, Brendan learns that Chris is home from college, because his fraternity shut down, after a pledge died from alcohol poisoning. Chris is fed up of the thought of college altogether and thinks he might join the marines. After pizza, Chris insists that Brendan accompany him to a high-school party. It is a more civilized affair than the high-school parties Brendan remembers, and he has an interesting conversation with Jason, an African American middle-distance runner who is heading to Dartmouth the following year. Jason’s girlfriend turns out to be Becca, who blew Brendan off, when he tried to contact her following his return. After Brendan has recovered from the shock of learning that Bella is with a guy who makes him feel like “such a loser by comparison” (252), he realizes that Amber is the only girl he cares about. Amber has deleted all of Brendan’s previous messages, apart from the Happy Valentine’s Day one he sent her.
Chapter 15 Summary: “Dirty Martini”
Eve decides that it is time to start dating again, and her girlfriends advise her to try internet dating and get some good pictures taken. She changes the color of her hair to golden brown. She dresses up in her tight skirt and blouse and takes a selfie in front of the mirror. Then she decides to go for a drink at the Lamplighter, Jim Hobie’s bar and talks to two uninteresting men. Finally, she sends the sexy selfie to Julian, who is very appreciative and asks for a shirtless one the next time.
Chapter 16 Summary: “An Invitation”
Eve is in the process of interviewing for Amanda’s replacement. While a girl called Hannah Gleezen, who has an obsequious love for seniors, seems like the perfect fit, Eve wants to hire someone with as much edge and vision for change as Amanda. In the parking lot, she sees a Volvo, which turns out to belong to Julian. Julian invites Eve to come to his parents’ house, because they are both away, even when Eve tells him they “can never be a couple” (270).
Chapter 17 Summary: “Coyote”
While Eve has “no intention” of hooking up with Julian, the thought obsesses her the entire week Julian’s parents are away, and she does not take the chance to visit him, because she has no one else desiring her in that way. She tries to make amends for her teasing texts by dropping the leftovers from Brendan’s dinner outside Julian’s house. The next night, when Julian sends her a message saying how crazy he is for her, Eve tells him he will see her the next day.
Chapter 18 Summary: “Garage Door”
Eve finally concedes that the tryst with her and Julian will happen and develops a mental foreign-movie-style image of “a beautiful woman of a certain age” (281) going to visit her younger lover in the night. While Eve plans to visit Julian after work, she is distracted when the handicapped toilet outside the Senior Center, overflows. She has to call George, son of deceased Roy Rafferty, who was banned from the Center for masturbating in the women’s toilets.
Eve and George talk, and he tells her about the tough year he has had following his wife Lorraine’s death from cancer and both his parents’ deaths.
Eve plans to go to Julian’s and circles his house twice, but her nerves are a wreck. She realizes that she smells like the Senior Center and goes home to shower. In a bad mood, she snaps at Brendan, who is playing video games, and gives him a lecture about having respect for women. Then, Eve takes a shower and takes a photo for Julian, where she is naked apart from her open bathrobe. Then, she deletes and blocks his number.
Chapter 19 Summary: “Red Carpet”
The chapter opens with Eve’s wedding, the following September. Since the past springtime, Eve has been dating George. On their first date, George confessed how he struggled with feelings of sexual frustration and pornography addiction during his wife’s long illness and felt that he was “losing his mind” (306). Brendan has coped well with the changes, feeling that George fills “an empty space” in his and his mother’s life (302). Brendan finds working as a plumber’s apprentice fulfilling. However, he is still thinking about Amber, who sent him a long email over the summer, and of potentially reapplying to school.
While Margo and Dumell attend the wedding, Amanda does not, although she takes Eve out for a celebratory lunch. There, Amanda tells Eve that she and Julian had been hooking up in the springtime, but that the affair is now over that she has a new partner, and Julian is heading off to college. Eve confesses to Amanda that she sent Julian a sexy photograph. As she is about to walk up the aisle, Eve remembers the singular odd incident in her new relationship: the time, when during sex, he called her his “MILF” (306). At the time, she thought to ask him if he was the one who sent the message calling her a “MILF,” but she decided not to.
Parts 4-5 Analysis
Eve must accept that her confusion of life and pornography has damaged her professional relationship and friendship with Amanda, once the sexual frisson between them fades. Eve admits that “she’d been a terrible boss—completely irresponsible, not to mention legally culpable—and she’d put Amanda in an impossible position, giving her no choice but to leave” (231). While Eve and Amanda have lunch prior to the former’s wedding, they are somewhat guarded and embarrassed with one another, and there is the impression that they will never recover their former intimacy.
Eve’s sense of guilt towards Amanda and Julian leads her to overcompensate in the maternal stakes; she gives up her evening class so that Brendan can continue his education at Eastern Community College without facing the indignity of bumping into his mother in the library. Still, Eve feels the sacrifice acutely, becoming “like a teenager, grounded indefinitely for one stupid mistake, though she was also the parent who had imposed the punishment, which meant that, as usual, she had no one to blame but herself” (243). The self-inflicted shrinking of her life, and her retirement from the social scenarios that permitted real-life sexual possibilities, makes Julian’s text message advances alluring, and she dallies with the possibility of an illicit sexual adventure with him. Here, Perrotta shows how Eve, who has had a taste of sexual freedom, cannot go back to being Brendan’s devoted Mom, and that something will inevitably change.
When Brendan returns home, he quickly learns that life in Haddington will not be a repeat of his senior year of high school. While all his friends are moving ahead with their college lives and Bella is dating someone who makes Brendan feel inadequate, Brendan is forced to attend community college, take classes that do not interest him, and hang around with other misfits. While he is unsure of his calling in life, he finds that George’s offer to set him up as a plumber’s apprentice gives him the “sense of accomplishment” (301) that eludes him in his academic work. It is only after a summer of hard manual labor that Brendan begins to appreciate how lucky he was to have the opportunity to attend college and considers reapplying.
In a final twist, Eve is about to walk up the aisle when she has a flashback to a sexual episode where George said that he had been “dreaming” about her for a long time and called her his “MILF” (306). Eve was initially upset, “a chill spreading through her body” (306), as she wonders whether George was the one who sent the original message that inspired her sexual adventure. If so, it would assert George’s presence more emphatically in the novel’s plot; he would be the catalyst for Eve’s sexual adventure and the reason for its heteronormative conclusion. However, Eve is content to live with ambiguity and treat George’s comment as “just a passing shadow,” the “shape your body made when the sun came out” (307). Perrotta’s sun and shadow metaphor indicates that as soon as someone comes fully into the light and becomes known to another person, their shadow-side also appears. Eve has the maturity to accept that everyone has a shadow-side that must be acknowledged, and yet does not preclude them from love.
Unlock all 40 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
