The final short stories in the collection, “You Can’t Be Too Careful” and “The Ginger Rogers Sermon,” reframe the novel’s explorations of both the Destabilizing Nature of Loss and Grief and Female Agency Constrained by Domesticity and Gender Roles via recurring images of violence. In “You Can’t Be Too Careful,” the first-person narrator Jay loses his sense of dignity and control when he finds himself trapped out on the river in his own boat with a murderer. Jay is unsure how to handle this situation because he feels powerless. The story is told using the first-person “double I” perspective, meaning that Jay’s present tense perspective and past tense perspective overlap on the page. At the time of the incident, Jay felt immobilized by fear—terrified of losing his own life. In retrospect, he sees Butch as more of a clever hero and himself as a passive boobie; time has caused him to reframe his understanding of the story. At the same time, Jay pays little interest to the story’s true heart: Butch’s wife’s death. Butch’s heinous act of violence—committed because his wife allegedly slept with another man—is covertly embedded within Jay’s larger, retrospective account—almost as an afterthought or appendage to what Jay experienced. Jay’s dignity and mortality are at the fore of the narrative, while the wife remains lost in the shadows of his story. This formal presentation of Butch’s wife’s murder enacts how violence against women is often buried from public sight. The police have allegedly been searching for Butch and interrogating Jay for answers, but Jay barely comments upon the woman Butch killed. Her story is erased, while Butch is lauded as being “the smartest man alive” (181) for evading the police. In this story, Jay does lose his dignity—represented by the image of him tied in the marsh until he is found by some local children—but the story’s real loss centers around Butch’s wife—her story erased by the prominence of Butch’s legacy.

In the collection’s final story “The Ginger Rogers Sermon,” the narrator is forced to cope with a similarly complicated iteration of death and loss when she stumbles upon Slapper Jim’s body hanging from the tree on her family’s property. Here, losing Slapper Jim coincides with the narrator’s loss of innocence. Slapper Jim’s death follows her sexual awakening, implying that the narrator’s attempt to use Sex as a Form of Self-Exploration has caused this event. The story does cast blame on the narrator without explicitly naming the abusive dynamics of grooming—and potentially rape when they share a bed, though this is never stated. 

As Keegan implies throughout the collection, sex offers the characters the illusive opportunity for escape, for control, and for basic human comfort. However, each time the characters act on these impulses, they are also challenging social norms or their prescribed gender roles. In Keegan’s narrative universe, rebelling against these systems almost always has devastating results. The image of Slapper Jim’s death in “The Ginger Rogers Sermon” echoes the image of Butch’s wife’s death in “You Can’t Be Too Careful,” embedded into the narrative and minimized by the narrative precedence put on surrounding events. Indeed, the final short story ends with the image of the narrator and her family dancing in the parlor, a scene that conjures a celebratory rather than a mournful mood. Slapper Jim’s death is glossed over, yet the family teaches their son, Eugene, to dance as though Slapper Jim’s ability to dance led to his downfall. In this final scene, each character returns to their prescribed gendered norms, as Eugene learns to dance and seduce and the narrator learns to follow.