Mary Coin

In 2010, Walker Dodge, a university professor of social history, drives through Porter, his declining hometown in California's Central Valley, to the house where his father, George, is dying. George turned century-old fruit groves into Dodge Holdings, a successful farming corporation, and dismissed Walker's desire to study history. As EMTs load George onto a gurney, the old man grips Walker's wrist and whispers, "Burn me up" (23).

Back in San Francisco, Walker teaches a course on how photographs shape cultural meaning. His ex-wife, Lisette, calls with news that their sixteen-year-old daughter, Alice, was picked up drunk. Walker and Lisette share anxious conversations about Alice's defiance and the quiet compliance of their younger son, Isaac. After George's death, Walker meets his uncle Edward at the memorial. Edward, George's half-brother who was cut out of the family business by their father, shares stories about George's hidden toughness. On a trip to Humboldt County, Walker, Alice, and Isaac scatter George's ashes among the redwoods.

The novel shifts to Oklahoma in 1920, where Mary, a sixteen-year-old of Cherokee and Russian heritage, lives in a sod house with her mother, Doris, and siblings. Doris carries the weight of her own father's history: He killed a white man and was shot dead by a posse. She warns Mary that her intense stare makes her strange. Mary is captivated by Toby Coin, a sickly neighbor boy whose persistence she admires. When a traveling photographer pays locals to pose in costume, Mary volunteers, but the man dismisses her as not looking authentically Indigenous. She poses defiantly and earns a dollar in quarters. At home, Doris slaps her with the coins, leaving a permanent scar on Mary's chin.

Mary's sister Betsy falls ill that winter and dies while Mary is away at the Coin farm. Toby visits to pay respects and admits he has been aware of Mary watching him. They marry in 1921, already expecting a child. When Toby's father sells the farm, the couple drives west to California in an old Hudson. Doris gives Mary a framed photograph of her grandfather as a parting gift. Over the following years, Mary and Toby have six children: Ellie, Trevor, June, Della, Ray, and James. Mary maintains fierce domestic order as the family moves from mill to mill with diminishing work during the Depression. In Corcoran, California, Toby's persistent cough is diagnosed as tuberculosis. When Toby dies, Mary tells her children, "We're alone" (90), and stops believing in God.

A parallel storyline follows Vera Dare, a portrait photographer in San Francisco who walks with a limp from childhood polio. Her father, a lawyer who called her beautiful, abandoned the family when she was thirteen, fleeing to Europe with embezzled money. Vera marries Everett Makin, a charismatic painter twenty years her senior, and they have two sons, Philip and Miller. Everett's serial infidelities leave Vera lonely and insecure. On a trip to Taos, New Mexico, she attempts landscape photography and senses her studio portraiture is a dead end. The Depression devastates their finances; Vera and Everett separate and send the boys to board with a caretaker in Oakland. On New Year's Day 1932, Vera photographs unemployed men on the streets below her studio, recognizing in them a kinship with her own sense of inadequacy. This marks her turning point from society portraitist to government documentary photographer.

In Porter, California, in 1935, Mary picks oranges at the Dodge groves. She begins a sexual relationship with Charles "Charlie" Dodge, the owner's son, keeping the affair strictly physical. When Mary becomes pregnant, Charlie arranges for a back-alley abortion, but Mary secretly refuses the procedure. When Charlie discovers the truth, he doubles her wages as hush money. Mary accepts it to feed her children.

She meets Earl, a genial itinerant worker who becomes a companion to her family. In Nipomo, California, in 1936, the Hudson breaks down beside a frozen pea field while the baby is sick with fever. Vera Dare arrives with a camera and asks to take Mary's picture for a government project documenting migrant conditions. Vera takes six photographs, moving progressively closer. For the final shot, Mary puts her hand to her chin, worrying the scar from her mother's slap, and looks away.

What the photograph does not reveal is the agonizing decision Mary has already begun to make. During a difficult labor in the groves, Mary collapsed and was carried to the Dodge house, where Alma, a young Mexican servant whose own milk had come in, nursed the newborn when the baby refused Mary's breast. Mary named the baby George, after her own father. Unable to sustain a seventh child alone, she carries the baby to the Dodge estate. Theodore Dodge, Charlie's father, opens the door with contempt. Mary begs: "He's your grandson. Please have mercy on him" (307). Alma takes the baby, and Theodore tells Mary they will never see her again. This revelation reframes George Dodge, Walker's father, as Mary Coin's seventh child.

The published photograph prompts a shipment of supplies to Nipomo, but Mary is long gone. The image makes Vera's career. In 1965, Vera is dying of esophageal cancer at her cabin on the California coast when she receives a letter from Mary demanding the photograph be recalled. Vera tries to draft a response but cannot find the right words. She attempts to photograph her own family but produces only sentimental snapshots. Her son Miller turns away, telling her it is too late. In a final letter she manages to send, Vera writes that a photograph is "a recognition" (302).

In 1982, Mary, now seventy-seven with terminal stomach cancer, retrieves cherished possessions from a Goodwill store, including a red felt hat reminiscent of one her mother once coveted. She boards a bus to San Francisco without telling her daughter Ellie. En route, she hires a taxi in Porter and sits outside the Dodge house, watching the young Walker Dodge ride a bicycle out of the driveway while a man calls after him. She continues to San Francisco and visits a museum retrospective of Vera's work, standing before the photograph that has shadowed her life. Museum visitors comment on the image without recognizing the woman beside them.

Walker's narrative resumes as he cleans out his father's house. In the basement, he discovers payroll ledgers listing Mary Coin's name with double wages. In his grandfather's library, he finds the famous photograph clipped from a newspaper, tucked inside a poetry book beside "The Highwayman." These discoveries coalesce into a suspicion that Mary Coin had an intimate connection to the Dodge family. Alice, meanwhile, is suspended from school after pills are found in her locker. Walker enrolls her in rehab and a new school in San Francisco. With Isaac's help, he traces Mary Coin's surviving family and visits her last living child, James, in a nursing home. James gives no response.

After James dies, Walker receives a package containing the red felt hat, the framed photograph of Mary's grandfather, and Vera's letter to Mary. He does not fully understand these items but senses a connection beyond proof. He and Alice drive to Nipomo and stand in a field that may or may not be where the photograph was taken. He tells Alice the story. She asks him to take her picture, then studies the image and says, "It doesn't look like me" (322). She presses delete and the image disappears, but Walker reflects that it will always exist somewhere, in a cloud, in zeros and ones: "There is no erasure" (322).