Lucille is the younger sister of the protagonist, Ruthie. Lucille, like Ruthie, is concerned throughout her childhood that their aunt, Sylvie, will leave them. This fear of abandonment is likely caused by the numerous different forms of abandonment the girls suffer from during their early years. One way Lucille demonstrates this fear is when she runs into the flooded downstairs to get a candle in order to keep Sylvie with the girls upstairs. Lucille and Ruthie are constant companions, and as children, they find no real friendship or companionship in other people. Like her sister, Lucille is a round and dynamic character.

Lucille is shown to lack a desire to conform when she is a child through her behavior at school. One day, she is accused of cheating. It is said that she would never cheat because she does not care enough about school in order to do so. At this point, she stops going to school, and she continues to avoid school by complaining of false ailments to her aunt. This scene demonstrates that as a child, Lucille does not have much more of a desire to fit in than her sister or her aunt do.

As Lucille grows, she starts to separate from Sylvie and Ruthie. At one point, she turns the light on in their house, something that is not normally done, and this draws attention to the lack of housekeeping performed in the house. Lucille is repulsed by the disarray. She starts to spend more time with people from school. When confronted by her previous truancy, Lucille readily takes on more homework in order to keep up with where she needs to be, demonstrating a desire to conform that she never previously had. Eventually matters get to be too much for her, and she leaves Sylvie and Ruthie and goes to live with her home-economics teacher, the very symbol of good housekeeping and conformity to societal standards. In this move, she becomes yet another person to abandon Ruthie. As the novel ends, the narrator, Ruthie, does not know what has become of Lucille, as the sisters have not had any contact since Ruthie and Sylvie left town.

Sylvie Fisher is the youngest of the three Foster sisters. Her father dies when she is young from a train derailment, and this leaves her and her sisters to be raised by their mother. Nevertheless, her younger years are depicted as happy ones, as she and her sisters, Molly and Helen, spend time doting on and around their mother, Sylvia. Very few other details are given about her young life in the town of Fingerbone. She is somewhat round and also shows some dynamic attributes.

She and her two sisters eventually leave town to rarely, if ever, return. While Molly goes to become a missionary in China and Helen goes off and gets married and has two children, Sylvie’s history during the years between when she leaves Fingerbone and returns is vague. She leads the girls to believe she was married, although Lucille doubts this at one point. She refuses to share many details about her husband.

Sylvie’s predominant characteristic is her transient nature, exemplified by the vague nature of her years away. She makes a firm commitment to care for her nieces after Helen’s death, and she never wavers from this. She stays with Lucille as long as Lucille will have her, and she never leaves Ruthie even after Ruthie grows into adulthood. This demonstrates the strength of her desire to take care of her nieces and the bond she has with family, because staying in Fingerbone is so contrary to what her roaming spirit desires. She shows that she keeps these ties to a transient lifestyle through the manner in which she sleeps on park benches and outdoors at times. When in her bed, she often sleeps on top of the covers. She keeps her belongings in a box under her bed, and she sleeps with her shoes under her pillow.

While Sylvie is the only real constant in the girls’ lives after their grandmother dies, she proves to be an insufficient caretaker by many standards. The house falls into serious disarray and disrepair to the extent that wild animals live in the home and cats frequently bring in the body parts of their catches and these are never cleaned up. Sylvie is not overly concerned with whether or not the girls go to school and demonstrates a lack of understanding of conventions in the excuses she relays to the school. Lucille eventually leaves because of these weaknesses, while Ruthie conforms to her aunt and eventually leads a transient lifestyle along with her.

As a young person, Edmund Foster wants to see more of the world, especially the mountains. As such, he hops on a train and tells the conductor that he wants to go to where the mountains are. Much like his daughter, Sylvie, and his granddaughter, Ruthie, he is consumed with wanderlust and takes a job working on a train, the very essence of the wanderlust spirit. He builds a home for his family in Fingerbone, Idaho, before he dies in a train derailment that leaves him, the train, and all the other passengers, forever buried at the bottom of a lake.

While Edmund has a desire to roam, his wife, Sylvia, does not. She is shown to have created a loving environment for her daughters as evidenced by the way they are said to dote on their mother in the years after their father’s death. Still, it is said that she did not teach them to love her well as evidenced by the fact that they all leave home in short succession and rarely, if ever, come back to Fingerbone or to her. Because of this, she does not leave anything in her will to her daughters.

Sylvia cares for her granddaughters well when they are left at her house. The fact that Helen left the girls with her mother rather than with the woman who frequently cared for them near their home shows that she trusts her mother to be a good caretaker. It also shows that she trusts her mother to care for the girls even though she did not know them. Sylvia’s housekeeping is good, and she is able to provide stability for the girls. Religiously, she believes she is slowly walking toward her ultimate fate in the afterlife and believes that when there, life will continue on just as it has. This stems from a likely belief in predestination, a central characteristic of Calvinism that frequently appears in Robinson’s novels.

The grandmother’s careful care of her granddaughters continues on with a plan for them after her death. She is elderly and knows she will not live long enough to raise them to adulthood. She leaves all she has to her granddaughters, and then she leaves them in the care of her sisters-in-law, Lily and Nona. Like her, these two women are steady and stable, but unlike her, they do not have the deep loyalty to the girls and the willingness to upend their lifestyle to look after children. Through this contrast, Sylvia is shown to be self-sacrificing and a natural caretaker, while Lily and Nona are shown to not be.