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 21-29Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 21 Summary: “Company Lunch”
Sookie and Lester come to Lucy’s house the next day to invite her to lunch. Lucy has started losing weight because she has trouble swallowing her food. She agrees to go out to lunch, and when she tells Lester and Sookie why she hasn’t been eating, Lester apologizes for taking her and Fred to the quarry that night. While at lunch, Lucy learns that there was another shark attack in the bay. Before going home, Lucy stops at the bookstore, where the bookstore owner gives her a book on great white sharks, pretending that Fred had ordered it before he died.
Chapter 22 Summary: “Chinese Shoes”
Lucy sees Fiona outside the bookstore, so she goes with her down the street to Mrs. Wong’s Chinese import shop. Fiona is buying a pair of Chinese Mary Jane slippers; Lucy’s mother used to buy her similar shoes. Lucy and Fiona go get ice cream together, and Fiona suggests that Lucy talk to the school counselor, Mr. Scanlon, about Fred and her mother. Fiona asks Lucy about the mermaid pendant she is wearing, and Lucy tells her she found it in Fred’s backpack. Fiona wonders if Fred planned to give it to Lucy as a present. Lucy also tells Fiona about her mother’s research proposal and Vern’s invitation. Fiona suggests that Lucy ask Sookie to drive her to see Vern at his home in Maine.
Later that afternoon, Lucy uses her new book on great white sharks to practice sketching. She sketches a shark onto a postcard and asks Fred if he’s been sending her signs through the sharks that keep appearing in her life.
Chapter 23 Summary: “Sookie Steps In”
Lucy has a nightmare about Fred and wakes up. Her father tells her that she couldn’t have saved him and confesses that grief has been weighing him down, too. Sookie shows up with groceries, offering to help Lucy and her father. On the news, one of Helen’s old coworkers, Dr. Robin Walker, discusses yet another shark sighting off the coast. Before Sookie leaves, Lucy asks him if he’ll drive her and her father to go visit Vern the next day. Lucy hasn’t asked Tom about this yet, but she’s hoping Sookie will say yes anyway. Mr. Patterson overhears their conversation, and Lucy invites him as well. Mr. Patterson offers his car for the trip. When Lucy comes back inside, she asks her father about the trip, and he agrees.
Chapter 24 Summary: “Road Trip”
The next day, Lucy, Mr. Patterson, Sookie, and Tom take Mr. Patterson’s car on a road trip to Maine to visit Vern Divine. Marion, Vern’s nurse, greets them at the door. Vern and Mr. Patterson bond over Moxie, their favorite soda, and Vern shows Lucy pictures of Helen from when she worked as an assistant for Vern. Lucy asks Vern about Helen’s research proposal, and he remembers some details, but he starts getting tired and confuses Lucy with Helen as he talks to her. While Vern rests, Marion makes sandwiches for the group and gives Lucy some tips about overcoming her swallowing issue. She tells her to try eating soft foods and to tell herself, “My body knows how to do this” (239).
Chapter 25 Summary: “The Presence of a Lady”
Mr. Patterson suggests that the group stay at a motel for the night rather than driving back to Rockport. Sookie asks him why he wants to stay, but Mr. Patterson doesn’t explain. Later that evening, Mr. Patterson shows Lucy the urn of his wife’s ashes that he brought with him on the trip. He says he wants to take out a boat in the morning to spread his wife’s ashes on a nearby island, French’s Island, that held special significance in their marriage. Previously, he hadn’t felt ready to say goodbye, and he was rarely in Maine anymore, but he wanted to take the opportunity of this trip to finally do this. Lucy asks her father about it, and they all agree to go.
Chapter 26 Summary: “Interconnected”
The next morning, the group borrows Vern’s boat and takes Mr. Patterson to French’s Island for him to scatter his wife’s ashes. They return to Vern’s house, and Sookie and Mr. Patterson take Marion and Vern out on the water while Lucy and her father look at more photographs. After his boat ride, Vern tells Lucy, who he still thinks is Helen, to keep up her research to protect the sharks. As the group drives back to Rockport, Lucy plays Fred’s Miles Davis CD, thinking, “I [am] never going to look out my window and see Fred dance again. And I [will] never have fifty more years with my mother, whom everyone seem[s] to know better than I [do]” (260).
Assuming that Lucy is asleep, Sookie and Tom talk about her struggles with eating and about how Tom is doing since he’s been stuck on the couch while his leg heals. Sookie gives Tom a piece of advice he used to hear from Helen: “Don’t resist pain […] [When] you feel sad or angry or afraid, let yourself feel it” (261). At this moment, Lucy opens her eyes and tells Sookie that she’s been feeling pain all summer and doesn’t know what to do about it. Mr. Patterson, who has been listening, advises Lucy and Tom to adjust and adapt.
Chapter 27 Summary: “Dr. Robin Walker”
A few days pass without any new shark sightings, and Lucy notices that her work on the field guide looks like the sketches in her mother’s proposal. Though Lucy has learned a lot about sharks, she doesn’t feel like she understands them well enough to draw the official great white shark for the field guide. Lucy finds Dr. Robin Walker’s phone number in her mother’s office and calls her for more information about the proposal. Dr. Robin remembers the proposal and tells Lucy that she’s been trying to convince Sookie to agree to pilot the harpoon boat again so that they can put Helen’s plan into action. Lucy goes downstairs to ask her father for help convincing Sookie, but her father gives her a postcard. The postcard is from Fiona, who found it in Fred’s room and decided to write Lucy a message. Fiona notes that Fred cared more about his appearance that summer than he had before, and she asks Lucy if she knows the reason. Lucy tacks the postcard up in her room as a reminder of Fred.
Chapter 28 Summary: “Gin Rummy”
Lucy writes two more postcards to Fred, asking him to send another shark as a sign that he is listening. After dropping the postcards off, Lucy sees the school counselor, Mr. Scanlon, in town, and she introduces herself. Mr. Scanlon offers to talk with Lucy, and she agrees. While they talk, they play a game of gin rummy. Lucy asks Mr. Scanlon whether it’s okay that she’s been writing postcards to Fred and interpreting shark sightings as signs. Lucy says, “I get that our friendship was meaningful, but I’m so confused as to what it meant in the end” (282). Mr. Scanlon suggests that writing the postcards may help Lucy understand her friendship with Fred better as she grieves.
Chapter 29 Summary: “Lobster Dinner”
As Tom’s leg slowly heals, Sookie comes over to the house more often. One afternoon, Tom invites Sookie and Mr. Patterson over for lobster. During dinner, Maggie knocks on the door and shows Lucy the pile of postcards she’s been receiving. All the postcards Lucy has been sending Fred have made it to his house, and Maggie has been collecting them. Maggie notices the mermaid pendant around Lucy’s neck and tells her to ask Mr. Patterson about it since Lucy still doesn’t know if Fred meant for her to have it. Tom encourages Maggie not to hold Fred’s death against anyone, especially the older teenagers like Lester who had been there that night.
Lucy asks Mr. Patterson about the pendant, and at first, he’s shocked that she has it on a dental floss chain. Lucy, frustrated and confused, says, “Everyone says […] that there was this deep meaning [between me and Fred]. Why can’t anyone tell me what the meaning was?!” (296). She throws the pendant away, which upsets Mr. Patterson. Mr. Patterson explains to Lucy that Fred asked him one day how he could get Lucy to be his girlfriend, and Mr. Patterson let Fred choose a piece of jewelry from Mrs. Patterson’s jewelry box to give to Lucy as a gift. Fred chose the mermaid because the pendant was also a mechanical pencil. Mr. Patterson tells Lucy that she was Fred’s “favorite person in the world and he wanted to tell [her this]” (299).
Chapters 21-29 Analysis
This section uses the motif of survival and adaptability to explore how people move forward through grief, continuing to form new relationships even with the certainty of loss. For instance, Sookie’s behavior after Fred’s death is a foil to his behavior after Helen’s death; Sookie brings food to Lucy’s house, checks in on Tom, and agrees to drive them to see Helen’s mentor, Vern. While he had isolated himself before, he reaches out and connects with people this time around and seems happier because of it. While Lucy and her father didn’t talk about their feelings after Helen’s death, in this section, Lucy’s father tells her, “I need to let [the grief about Helen and Fred] go, so the grief doesn’t eat me alive” (211). The metaphor of being eaten alive alludes to the sharks that are getting ever closer to the coast and attacking people, connecting emotional survival with physical survival. Here, grief is characterized as a predator waiting to attack people who attempt to bear its weight alone. These examples highlight the importance of The Role of Community in Coping With Grief.
Vern Divine and Mr. Patterson represent people who successfully adapt to situations, surviving despite the unknown. Vern is living with short-term memory loss, but he is still interested in meeting new people, like Lucy and Sookie, and he enjoys taking his boat out on the lake. On the other hand, Sookie is a foil to Vern; when he sees the challenges Vern is living with, he says, “If I ever get like that, just take me out to the pasture and shoot me” (234). Vern embraces life, despite its challenges, whereas Sookie’s first instinct is to give up on his life if it doesn’t go the way he plans. This detail shows that Sookie, Lucy, and Tom can learn positivity and fortitude from the older generation. In the car on the way home from their visit with Vern, Lucy and Tom both wonder about how they are supposed to live through the pain of loss. Mr. Patterson, a widower, tells them to “adapt” and “adjust” (262). Mr. Patterson’s suggestion that they “adapt” echoes the language of survival and adaptation that Helen uses to talk about sharks returning to the coast, which signifies The Interconnectedness of Humans and Nature.
When Lucy returns from her road trip, she establishes two new relationships that represent how she’ll continue living and surviving, despite her grief. The first relationship is with Dr. Robin Walker, a former colleague of her mother’s. Though Lucy’s connection to Dr. Robin is through Lucy’s mother, their mentor-mentee relationship is joyful and encouraging to Lucy. Similarly, Lucy deepens her relationship with Fiona, moving their friendship out of the shadow of Fred’s death. Both characters represent that Lucy is processing her grief, rather than suppressing it. The climax of Lucy’s grief process occurs in Chapter 29 when she throws away the mermaid pendant out of frustration that she doesn’t understand the true meaning of her friendship with Fred. In this moment, Lucy shares her confused, grief-stricken feelings with everyone present—Tom, Sookie, Maggie, and Mr. Patterson—and though it is painful, she finally receives the explanation behind the mermaid pendant. In this moment, Lucy has finally taken her mother’s advice and not resisted her pain, and as a result, she can finally move past it.
