46 pages • 1 hour read
Kate AllenThe Line Tender
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2019A 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 14-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 14 Summary: “The Golden Hour”
Fred never resurfaces, and the diving team is called to the scene to search for him. Lucy’s father is one of the divers. There are three main positions in a diving rescue: the primary diver, the safety diver, and the line tender. The primary diver, tethered to the line, sinks to the bottom to search for the victim. After 20 minutes, the primary diver and the safety diver trade off. Meanwhile, the line tender holds the line connecting the divers to the shore, directing the search in an arch and communicating with the divers through tugs on the line. The dive team finds Fred’s body within the “golden hour” or the first 60 minutes after the accident, but he’s pronounced dead at the hospital.
Chapter 15 Summary: “In Our Best Clothes”
At Fred’s funeral, Lucy thinks about how she and her father stopped going to Mass after her mother died. She replays the night of Fred’s death in her mind, thinking about the imaginary line she held from her wrist to the dive team while they looked for Fred. During the search for Fred, Lucy’s father injured his leg, and since Fred’s death, Lucy has had trouble swallowing and breathing. Overwhelmed by the funeral, Lucy starts panicking, and she excuses herself to get some air outside. Her science teacher from school, who had encouraged the field guide assignment that she and Fred were working on, offers to talk with Lucy, but she declines.
Chapter 16 Summary: “Out the Window”
In the days after Fred’s funeral, Lucy and her father are “on the same schedule: forage, nap, Red Sox, insomnia” (126). Lucy reads all of the news articles about the accident so that she can piece together what happened; her father hasn’t wanted to share details with her. In one of the articles, she reads that her father was the diver who found Fred’s body. When she asks him why he kept this information from her, he says that he didn’t want to upset her, but Lucy suspects that he just didn’t want to talk about it. That night, Lucy sees Fred’s mother, Maggie, through Fred’s window. Maggie invites Lucy over to their house. She apologizes for sending Lucy and Fred to the party with his sisters, but she is angry that Lester, one of the older boys who was at the quarry that night, let Fred and Lucy drink. Fiona finds Lucy and Maggie in Fred’s room, and she stays with Lucy when Maggie goes back downstairs. Fiona says she saw Fred kiss Lucy that night, and she asks if they were dating. Lucy is confused about her relationship with Fred and doesn’t know what to call it. She asks Fiona if she can take the field guide and her mother’s research out of Fred’s backpack. Fiona says she can have the entire backpack and throws it out the window, claiming that Maggie won’t let Lucy have it if she spots her leaving with it. Lucy leaves the house and picks up the backpack on her way home.
Chapter 17 Summary: “Fred’s Backpack”
When Lucy gets home, she convinces her father to share more details about the rescue. Her father confesses that he should’ve excused himself from it because it was personal; he was desperate to save Fred and wasn’t as careful as he should’ve been, which led to his leg injury. Lucy looks through Fred’s backpack and finds her mother’s research proposal with some of Fred’s notes, their field guide, and a small, wrapped package.
Chapter 18 Summary: “Postcard”
The package contains a gold mermaid pendant. Lucy doesn’t know if it was supposed to be a gift for her, but she strings the pendant on some dental floss and ties it around her neck. Wishing she could ask Fred what it meant, she writes out a message to Fred about the necklace on a postcard. She sneaks out of her house and bikes to the post office, slipping the card into the box. She knows Fred is gone, but putting the message in the postcard makes her “[feel] lighter inside, as though [she has] cleared something out of [her] head” (155).
Chapter 19 Summary: “All Biologists Want to Know Why”
The next morning, Lucy sees a news article about a shark trailing a sea kayaker off the coast. This prompts her to return to her mother’s research article. Helen planned to take a harpoon fishing boat off the coast and use sonar tags to tag great white sharks as they hunted the increasing population of seals. Lucy discovers from the proposal that Sookie was going to pilot the boat for her mother’s study. Lucy writes another postcard to Fred to tell him about the shark and Sookie, and then she goes to Sookie’s boat.
Sookie asks Lucy to help him clean some fish. She asks him about the research study, his friendship with her mother, and why he didn’t call the biologists when he caught the shark. Sookie says that biologists remind him of Helen and he wants to push away his grief. When he saw the news report with the footage of Helen, he took it as a sign that he should try to get back in touch with the biologists and with Tom. Sookie invites Lucy to come work with him on the boat from time to time.
Chapter 20 Summary: “Vern Divine”
When Lucy comes back from the dock, she visits with Mr. Patterson and learns more about his relationship with his wife, who passed away many years ago. Lucy asks Mr. Patterson what her father was like when her mother was alive, and she learns that her mother helped her father to connect with people and stay in touch with his friends. Mr. Patterson says, “If [Tom] was prone to turning inward, [Helen] helped him look outward” (179). Later that evening, Lucy asks her father for help with her shark drawing; she’s struggling to capture the shark’s movement on the page. Her father suggests that knowing more about the inside of a shark might help her draw it better.
Alongside Sookie’s name in Helen’s research proposal, Lucy sees the name of another scientist: Vern Divine. According to Tom, Vern was her mother’s mentor. Lucy decides to call Vern to ask him questions about the proposal, but his nurse answers the phone instead. Vern has a condition that affects his short-term memory, but he remembers Lucy’s mother. Vern’s nurse invites Lucy to come visit.
Chapters 14-20 Analysis
In the wake of Fred’s death, the author introduces two key symbols: the line tender and the mermaid pendant. The line tender is the member of a scuba team who connects the diver to the team on land, and this represents Lucy’s connection to Fred. When she is waiting in the ambulance, she “imagine[s] a string that wrap[s] around [her] hand […] It [] drop[s] in the water, the end of the string moving toward Fred […] the string curl[s] around Fred’s wrist. [She holds] the line” (119). She thinks of the link between them as being so strong that it has the power to save Fred and will him back to life. However, while she thinks of herself as the rescuer in this instance, it is Fred who has saved her in the past by supporting her after her mother’s death. Lucy thinks of their friendship as a lifeline—it saved her from the unknown, connecting her to conversation and companionship.
Later, when Fiona gives Lucy Fred’s backpack, she finds a wrapped gold mermaid pendant in it. Though Lucy isn’t sure the pendant is meant for her, she claims it anyway. The pendant represents Fred’s feelings for Lucy—feelings that she doesn’t totally understand but senses are true. At first, Lucy hides the pendant when she wears it, symbolizing how her feelings for Fred, and his for her, were a secret kept between the two of them.
Both these symbols develop the theme of The Role of Community in Coping With Grief. The line tender and the gift represent companionship, not isolation. Part of Lucy’s confusion about the pendant comes because she keeps it a secret; only when Lucy asks others about the pendant’s significance will she really be able to understand the gift. In the same way, Lucy can only fully grieve Fred when she grieves him with others.
The aftermath of Fred’s death marks a turning point in Lucy’s relationship with her mother’s death and research. Lucy reads through Fred’s notes in their field guide, which leads her to read her mother’s research proposal; through this, she learns that Sookie was going to be a member of her mother’s research team. Instead of ignoring these connections, Lucy decides to follow her curiosity and investigate them. Lucy’s initiative leads her to having conversations with her father, Sookie, and Mr. Patterson about her mother. Prior to Fred’s death, Lucy didn’t talk about her mother with anyone; her silence kept her from processing her grief. Fred’s death and Lucy’s investigation into her mother’s research prompt Lucy to open up to her community, which begins her journey toward healing.
This section also develops the theme of The Interconnectedness of Humans and Nature through Lucy’s mother’s notes about shark behavior. Lucy reflects on her mother’s perspective that humans are guests in the ocean, and she wonders if humans will need to adapt their behaviors now that more great white sharks are swimming close to shore. Lucy believes that “after what [she’s] been through, it [is] unlikely [she’ll] be in the water anyway” (163), but she’s challenged by her mother’s perspective that people could live alongside sharks. Sharks are a symbol for death and the unknown. When Lucy is wondering whether she should avoid sharks and the ocean, she is in fact questioning whether the best course is to avoid death and the unknown altogether or if she should accept them the way her mother did. The author’s larger claim here is that humans, as part of the natural world, cannot avoid the unknown or escape death; instead, they should embrace these as part of the experience of living.
