Chances Are . . .
54 pages • 1-hour read
Richard RussoChances Are . . .
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Chapters 5-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of mental illness.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Lincoln”
Acting on his urge to dig more deeply into the events surrounding Jacy’s disappearance, Lincoln goes to the Vineyard Gazette office but finds it closed. As he stands outside the door, he contemplates his true purpose for visiting the island: to sell his late mother’s house and find a sense of closure. He calls his wife Anita, who corrects his faulty memory of the 1971 Memorial Day trip. She reminds him that the weekend was his idea; he had conceived of the notion after his parents cancelled their plans and left the house available. Anita points out that Lincoln ditched her family reunion to spend the weekend with his friends and that they all invited Jacy along at the last minute.
Anita suggests that Lincoln arranged the trip in order to choose between her and Jacy. Lincoln reflects on his parents’ unhappy marriage, his guilt over past choices, and his difficult relationship with his domineering father. When he sees a woman arrive to unlock the Gazette office, he takes this as a sign to continue his search for information about Jacy’s disappearance.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Teddy”
In the present, Teddy bikes to the Gay Head cliffs. After an awkward interaction with a tour group, he buys a postcard as a way to mirror Jacy’s decision to do the same when the two visited this place together in 1971. As Teddy takes in the view, the vista before him triggers an intense memory of Memorial Day, 1971.
In the flashback, the four friends’ mood was tense. Mickey suffered a swollen hand in the aftermath of punching Troyer the previous day in punishment for the man’s attempt to grope Jacy in the kitchen. Frustrated by the atmosphere, Jacy persuaded Teddy to drive her to Gay Head. On the secluded beach, she impulsively stripped naked and ran into the frigid water, urging Teddy to follow her. When he caught up to her in the water, they shared an intimate, naked embrace in the waves, and Teddy was overjoyed at the thought that she had “chosen” him. Afterward, Jacy told him that she might not marry her fiancé after all.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Lincoln”
In the Vineyard Gazette microfilm room, Lincoln finds an article about the disappearance of Justine “Jacy” Calloway. The 1971 story details the initial police investigation and reveals that Jacy had lied to her family about her whereabouts. Lincoln also learns that her fiancé received a postcard postmarked from the island, in which she broke off their engagement. Lincoln discusses the story with Beverly, a newspaper staffer, and asks if she knows Troyer.
Beverly reacts with fear, calling Troyer “trouble.” She becomes visibly alarmed when she realizes that Lincoln suspects Troyer of being involved in Jacy’s disappearance. The conversation also deepens Lincoln’s own unease about his unfriendly neighbor.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Teddy”
At Gay Head, Teddy recalls the summer of 1971. In the flashback, Jacy’s fiancé, Vance, confronted Teddy in a Boston diner after Jacy’s disappearance. Vance aggressively questioned Teddy about the Vineyard weekend, revealing that Jacy’s family was collapsing in the wake of her disappearance. His interrogation culminated in a grief-stricken accusation when he finally broke down and asked, “Did you kill her…?” (114). Teddy, feeling emotionally gutted, emphatically denied this.
A few days later, the encounter triggered a severe panic attack, and Teddy checked himself into a hospital. He was consumed by guilt, by his class resentment toward the privileged Vance, and by a grim feeling that his own suffering was deserved. He also recalled his failed attempts to convince Mickey to dodge the draft.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Lincoln”
In the present, Beverly calls Lincoln, revealing that she is the daughter-in-law of Joe Coffin, a retired police chief who may have more information about Jacy’s case. She urges Lincoln to meet Coffin before the latter’s surgery the next day. When Lincoln arrives at Coffin’s apartment, the ailing ex-chief retrieves a thin “Missing Girl” case file and aggressively questions Lincoln’s motives.
Coffin recalls interviewing an injured Troyer after the 1971 Memorial Day weekend; he also tells Lincoln that the three friends were lucky not to be treated as suspects in the case. Coffin states that he does not believe Lincoln and his friends to be guilty, as Lincoln’s investigative mission does not reflect the behavior of a guilty man. When pressed, Coffin eventually reveals that he and Troyer were high school football teammates; a young Troyer had lived with the Coffin family during his senior year.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Teddy”
In the present, Teddy calls Theresa to finally admit to his own shortcomings and explain why his quirks and hesitation caused their relationship to fail. When she presses him for the real reason, he recounts the true story of the 1971 weekend.
A brief flashback scene describes a last, happy meal at the Chilmark house as the friends sang “Chances Are” while standing arm-in-arm. The next morning, Teddy watched Jacy leave a note and slip away. That was the last time he saw her alive.
In the present, Teddy continues his conversation with Theresa, confessing the same secret that he revealed to Jacy at Gay Head in 1971: that a high school spinal injury left him with erectile dysfunction.
The narrative returns to the moment of Jacy’s final departure from the Chilmark house, when Lincoln found her note and he and Teddy let her go without confronting her, their friendship already fractured by Teddy’s revelation and the weekend’s events.
Chapters 5-10 Analysis
As Lincoln’s search through the Vineyard Gazette archives and his meeting with retired police chief Joe Coffin complicate his own recollections and emotions, he cannot yet bring himself to acknowledge the reality of The Unknowable Past and the Fallibility of Memory. Faced with the impossibility of discovering objective truth in events that have long since been eroded by the slow, inexorable passage of time, Lincoln receives a further check on his own confidence when Anita’s corrections show that his memories are selective at best. As Lincoln struggles to piece together the salient details of that fateful Memorial Day weekend, the novel’s investigative framework allows Russo to create conflicting narratives that blend and overlap, casting a pall of uncertainty over the characters’ struggle to make sense of their memories. This selectivity becomes particularly pronounced when Lincoln is forced to reexamine his own past choices, which had a greater effect on the weekend’s events than he remembered.
The theme of Defining Masculinity Through Class and Character reaches its most pointed expression in the confrontation between Teddy and Vance at the Greek diner, where class resentment crystallizes into a broader interrogation of masculine worth. While Vance initially leads with a show of concern about Jacy, his aggressive questioning soon reveals that his deeper concern is to establish his superior claim to her through not-so-subtle economic and social positioning. His final accusation—“You were fucking hashers” (114)—distills the class-based hierarchy that governs their world, reducing Teddy and his friends to their service roles while positioning himself as inherently deserving of Jacy’s affection while conveniently ignoring her own choice to reject him. This scene demonstrates how masculinity becomes inextricably linked to social status, as Vance presents his wealth and prospects as virtues that should be championed over the very real emotional connections that existed between Jacy and her three friends.
The revelation of Teddy’s spinal injury and subsequent erectile dysfunction provides the emotional and structural climax of these chapters, transforming what initially appears to be a coming-of-age story into a meditation on physical limitation and psychological damage. Teddy’s confession to Theresa serves as the novel’s most direct confrontation with The Collision of Chance, Fate, and Personal Choice, as his high school basketball injury becomes the defining moment that shapes the course of his career and hinders his adult relationships. Teddy’s high school accident thus functions as both a literal physical trauma and a metaphorical representation of the fact that a single fateful moment can alter the trajectory of an entire life.
The parallel structure between past recollections and present investigations reveals how the characters’ attempts to understand their shared history ultimately become exercises in self-discovery. Specifically, Lincoln’s research into Jacy’s disappearance mirrors the gradual unveiling of the friends’ psychological complexities and hidden fears. The motif of secrets and hidden truths thus operates on multiple levels and across multiple experiences, from Jacy’s concealed family problems to Teddy’s physical limitations, demonstrating that people often hide the most significant aspects of their lives from even their most intimate friends. As memories collide in the present-day timeline, the three aging men must inevitably confront uncomfortable truths about themselves and each other, and their questions about Jacy force them to reexamine their own choices, limitations, and failures during that pivotal weekend.
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