The narrative shifts to Robert Noonan, formerly Bobby Marconi, who offers his studio couch to Todd Lichtner for the night. Downstairs, Robert discovers an old, unopened letter from Sarah Lynch, Lucy’s wife. Inside are two yearbook photos of Jerzy Quinn and his obituary—he died at 62 in a crash that occurred because he was driving while intoxicated. Sarah’s note asks if Robert remembers the footbridge. Reading the obituary triggers a phantom pain in the wrist Robert broke during his childhood fight with Jerzy.

Through flashbacks, Robert recalls his rigid, angry father, a World War II veteran who returned home a changed man despite seeing no combat. Obsessed with status and respectability, he forbade friendships with Jews, “Negroes,” Poles, Slavs, and Irish—which included the Quinn family. Robert remembers Jerzy’s father, who had an alcohol use disorder and habitually sang in bars until thrown out, eventually freezing to death on his own back porch one snowy night while his wife and children were out of town.

The fight between Robert and Jerzy occurred the summer Robert discovered his father’s affair with a West End woman who lived next door to the Quinns. Jerzy knew about the affair and confronted Robert after hearing he’d played strip poker with Jerzy’s girlfriend, who was also Robert’s second cousin. The fight was ostensibly about the girl but really about their fathers—Jerzy’s dead one he wished alive, Robert’s living one he wished dead (164). After the fight, Robert’s father announced that he’d attend military school, then verbally abused Robert’s mother in front of the family. Robert went willingly, frightened by his capacity for rage. He also wanted to escape having to look at his mother, having seen in her what his father meant during the abusive tirade.

Robert recalls his final encounter with Jerzy at Murdick’s bar during senior year. Jerzy, now married with a daughter, expressed a fatalistic view that what matters is beyond one’s control. Back in the present, Robert reflects on whether Jerzy’s death was accidental or deliberate and considers what Sarah’s life with the conventional Lucy must be like.

After Bobby Marconi’s disappearance, Jerzy Quinn fills the power vacuum at Thomaston Junior High. By eighth grade, his dominance is complete—boys imitate his walk, his clothes, his ducktailed hair. His girlfriend is Karen Cirillo, voluptuous and beautiful. Her only serious rival for most beautiful girl in town is Nan Beverly, the clean, pretty Borough girl. Friday night dances at the YMCA become sites of thrilling social subversion where West End boys perform an aggressive line dance called the stomp. The last slow song always features the town’s two most prominent couples: Jerzy and Karen, and Nan and her boyfriend.

Big Lou struggles to rent the apartment above Ikey’s. When Tessa inspects it, she discovers fire damage hidden behind a painting and a toilet that won’t flush. A contractor confirms that the building’s wiring is hazardous. After six months of expensive repairs, they rent to Nancy Salvatore, Tessa’s old friend, and her daughter, Karen. Nancy’s brothers move her in, littering the street with beer cans.

Karen begins visiting Lucy in the store each evening. She asks for cigarettes, and he gives them to her despite knowing he shouldn’t. She reveals that Bobby Marconi is her second cousin and calls Thomaston a “shithole.” When Jerzy Quinn enters the store, Lucy wonders if Jerzy recognizes him as the boy he once locked in a trunk. Karen introduces Lucy as Lou, a friend of Bobby’s. She taunts Jerzy about the fight, but he’s unconcerned, making an intimate gesture by hooking his finger in Karen’s waistband.

Karen visits nightly but ignores Lucy at school. About a month later, Nancy’s ex-boyfriend, Buddy Nurt, moves in with Nancy, rekindling the relationship Nancy fled by moving into the apartment. He tries to start a tab at the store. Nancy storms in, furious, forbidding Big Lou from giving Buddy anything on her account. Karen confronts her mother, revealing that Buddy spied on her in the bath and entered her bedroom at night. Nancy admits that she needs someone in her life, even someone as loathsome as Buddy. Karen packs and leaves with her uncle and Jerzy Quinn. A month later, however, she returns.

One Saturday at the library, Lucy sees Gabriel Mock intoxicated in the parking lot. Gabriel smashes a whiskey bottle on Jack Beverly’s Cadillac, cracking the rear window. When Mr. Beverly asks if Lucy saw what happened, Lucy lies, saying no. Tessa later tells him she’s proud he lied, as both she and Lucy recognize that Gabriel, as a Black man, would likely face disproportionate consequences. The next day, Lucy finds Gabriel at Whitcombe Park. Gabriel explains his marital troubles and admits shame over his recent actions.

Lucy asks his mother why Nancy would take Buddy back. Tessa explains that people fear being alone more than anything. She tells Lucy she and Big Lou are together because they love each other and him, but warns him not to try to figure out love and to accept people as they are.

In the present day, 60-year-old Lucy prepares to take the elderly Tessa to their regular Friday lunch at Dot’s Sandwich Shoppe. He reflects on the family businesses, now run by his son, Owen, and the tension between Owen and his wife, Brindy. At the restaurant, Tessa complains about a “Support our Troops” bumper sticker, leading to a tense conversation about politics in which Tessa calls Lucy gullible for believing the Bush administration’s claims about the War on Terror.

Walking back through the alley behind the Bijou Theater, they encounter Buddy Nurt wearing Big Lou’s old high school letterman’s jacket. Buddy is dealing with mental illness, and the encounter deeply upsets Tessa. Back at her apartment, she gives Lucy an old photograph showing her, Big Lou, and Uncle Dec posing playfully in Ikey’s. When Lucy asks why she seems determined to make him remember his father negatively, Tessa states that she never wanted him to stop loving Big Lou; instead, she wanted Lucy to love her, be her friend, and take her side sometimes.

Lucy leaves shaken. He reflects on his father’s secret, confided before his death: Big Lou never actually voted, feeling unqualified to make such important decisions. He merely entered the voting booth and pretended to vote. Lucy decides he will never reveal this secret or his mother’s accusations to anyone, including Sarah. He acknowledges that both he and his mother saw the jacket on Buddy but chose not to mention it—complicit in each other’s silences.

The narrative flashes back to the night the Spinnarkle house caught fire. Big Lou spotted flames from Ikey’s and called Tessa, who phoned the fire department while he rushed across the street. He entered the burning house and helped rescue Janet and Edith Spinnarkle, both emerging naked and sooty. Big Lou emerged fully clothed but with singed eyebrows, trembling and asking if their own house would burn. While the neighborhood watched the blaze, someone robbed the unlocked store of its till money.

Months later, Tessa discovers that Buddy Nurt has been systematically stealing from them as well. Following her plan, Big Lou rigs the door with a shim so it can’t be pulled shut again; when Buddy tries to enter that night, the door wedges open, exposing his theft. He flees in a taxi. Police arrive, and after Tessa confronts Nancy and Karen about the thefts, an angry Nancy moves out with her brothers’ help. A dropped box spring breaks the car’s side mirror and later vanishes overnight.

After the confrontation, Tessa tells Big Lou she’s now his partner in running the store. Uncle Dec arrives as the new upstairs tenant. During the apartment inspection, Lucy has a “spell”—a disorienting episode marked by an aura and confusion. His disturbing associations link Uncle Dec to the trunk incident from his childhood and even, irrationally, to his mother. He recovers downstairs at Ikey’s with his parents’ help.

In the present, Sarah notices Lucy is out of sorts after lunch with Tessa. He tells her about encountering Buddy Nurt but conceals their bitter argument. He reflects on his mother’s habit of gifting his father’s possessions, as if erasing Big Lou’s memory. He acknowledges the truth in her accusation that he willfully sees only what he wants to see. He decides to buy his father’s jacket back from Buddy.

The narrative flashes back to Lucy’s eighth-grade year. At Newberry’s, Karen Cirillo appears with two girlfriends and lets Lucy buy her popcorn and movie ticket. At the Bijou, they sit in the back row usually reserved for Karen and Jerzy. When Jerzy arrives and sits with Karen, his friend Perry Kozlowski confronts Lucy, taking him up to the condemned balcony. Perry explains that Lucy crossed the line by sitting with Karen but says it’s over now. Perry points out Three Mock sitting with a white girl, Sarah Berg (who later marries Lucy and becomes Sarah Lynch), calling it another line-crossing. He reveals that his family is moving to the East End because his father got a job at General Electric.

As the movie ends, Perry confronts Three inside the theater, and they begin to scuffle. Sarah gets knocked back into her seat, clutching her bloody nose. The usher pushes both boys out the side exit. In the parking lot behind the theater, Lucy watches from the fire escape as Perry repeatedly knocks Three down. Despite pleas from Jerzy Quinn to stop, Perry continues until Three lies motionless on the pavement, having hit his head. A girl screams that he’s dead, though Three’s foot twitches. As Lucy leaves, Karen tells him it could have been him.

The next morning, Tessa tells a horrified Lucy that Three is in a coma and may die. She’s furious that no one intervened. Lucy admits he was part of the crowd that just watched. He confesses to giving Karen free cigarettes, and Tessa says she already knew. At Ikey’s, they learn that the elder Gabriel Mock went to Murdick’s bar to confront Perry’s father with a knife. Uncle Dec took the knife from Gabriel, but police still arrested him. Gabriel is fired from his job at Whitcombe Park and, after his arraignment, calls a cab—driven by Buddy Nurt—to take him to the train station so he can leave town. Lucy spends a week painting Gabriel’s abandoned fence, not knowing he’s been fired.

Three Mock remains in a coma for weeks. Jerzy Quinn’s reputation wanes, and he’s rumored to be sick. Perry Kozlowski moves to the East End and establishes new dominance. At year’s end, Perry tells Lucy that Jerzy had a testicle surgically removed. The Lynch family works long hours at the expanded Ikey’s, which is becoming more successful.

At the end-of-year student art show, Lucy’s drawing of Ikey’s doesn’t win a prize but receives two out of three possible checks from judges. He meets Sarah, who critiques his drawing kindly, explaining that he should trust his lines and not shade everything. She takes his hand and leads him to her second-prize-winning pen-and-ink drawing of her deceased younger brother, Rudy. They connect immediately. She explains her family’s humanist beliefs, her father’s disdain for Thomaston, and how her father insisted she accept Three’s invitation to the movie as a statement against bigotry.

The next day, Sarah comes to Ikey’s and creates a new pen-and-ink drawing of the store, depicting the whole Lynch family working together. She includes Sarah and Lucy holding hands at the register and a generic figure entering the store—later revealed to be Bobby Marconi, whom she’d heard Lucy describe so vividly she hoped to meet him one day. Tessa frames the drawing and hangs it in the store. Lucy reflects that the drawing marked the beginning of his relationship with Sarah and the end of his childhood “spells.”