Lila is the book’s clearest moral voice, and she earns the role by speaking from the hard-won experience that stems from her own struggles with addiction and mental health. She has been sober for years, has scars from self-harm, and has told Joe the story of the uncle who molested her when she was a child. When Joe insists that his mother is incapable of change and harshly cites Kathy’s multiple addictions and mental health crises as proof, Lila points out his hypocrisy when she refuses to let him pretend that his accusing description does not fit her as well. She demands, “Did you forget that I’m a drunk? I’m mentally unstable. Remember? I have the scars to prove it” (55). With these words, she makes it clear that in condemning his mother, Joe has also condemned her. Implicit in her argument is the belief that Kathy also has the ability to change for the better, and that Joe should acknowledge this truth.

In many respects, Lila serves as Joe’s moral compass when his own wanders off-track. Her insistence that Kathy might be capable of recovery forces him to reexamine his own prejudices and revisit the memories of his past, bit by bit. As he runs through a series of flashbacks that highlight the worst moments of his family’s life, Lila’s rebuke stands in sharp relief, emphasizing the viability of Recovery as a Daily Practice and implying that despite Joe’s skepticism, his mother has already begun to walk this path. Lila’s words also examine the difficulty of the recovery process, particularly when she tells Joe, “You act like there’s some kind of baptismal font that we drunks can walk through to change who we are—wretched on one side, but saved on the other. That’s not how it works” (56). Acting on the basis of her own experience with addiction, she opens Kathy’s letter and calls Kathy directly because she understands that the no-contact rule Joe has imposed does not allow for the possibility that people can change and improve themselves. As Lila knows from her own past, recovery is a daily battle that no one else gets to judge.

Additionally, Lila’s steady focus on passing the bar exam serves as a constant reminder for Joe that his personal crises are not the center of the world. While he prioritizes his own issues, the novel’s structure pointedly emphasizes that he callously leaves her without the emotional support that she needs. To make matters worse, he also saddles her with Jeremy’s care while he goes to Buckley on a whim. Lila is studying 8 to 10 hours a day and is terrified of failing this exam, and she still finds time to read with Jeremy and devote time to listening to Joe. When she takes crucial time away from studying and drives to Buckley to surprise Joe, only to find Vicky in his motel room, she levels a simple but telling accusation at Joe: “All I needed from you was for you to be a good man. That’s all I ever asked. You don’t have to be superman to make me happy. All you had to do was be a decent guy, and you couldn’t do that” (259). She tells Joe to leave, focuses on the exam, and only afterward does she deign to give him a second chance. While the reconciliation has a gentle, optimistic tone, the novel ultimately leaves on an open-ended note, with Joe realizing the treasure he has in Lila and smelling “the crisp scent of grass and pine—and hope” (340).

Jeremy, Joe’s 25-year-old brother, has autism and needs considerable support to function on a daily basis. In many ways, he is the novel’s quiet measure of every adult choice around him. Devoted to routines that help him to stay grounded in an unpredictable world, and he uses the plots of books like Dumbo and Bambi as templates to help him understand more complicated issues in real life, such as the absence of his mother. When Jeremy tells Joe, “Maybe when Bambi ran to the thicket his mother wasn’t there” (150), Joe realizes that Jeremy believes Kathy to be dead, and his first instinct is to lie and claim that Kathy is too sick to care for his brother. Jeremy lets the lie stand without fully absorbing it. A day later, alone in the Caspen Inn, Jeremy obeys Charlie’s malicious suggestion that he go home, walking out of the motel and heading toward Austin. Although Joe manages to find Jeremy before he comes to any harm, the protagonist is struck by the fact that his brother clearly still considers Kathy’s apartment to be his home. Despite all of Joe’s years of guardianship and Lila’s careful work with helping Jeremy to read, these efforts cannot negate the simple fact that Jeremy never agreed that Kathy should be erased from his life.

Throughout the novel, Jeremy serves as little more than a plot device, and this rather reductive treatment of a character with autism reflects the author’s own misconceptions and biases about this particular neurotype. Rather than allowing Jeremy to become a well-rounded character in his own right, Eskens limits Jeremy to an ancillary role; his primary function in the novel is to remind Joe of what is most important in his life. His fixation on Bambi and Dumbo—two stories about a separated mother and child—emphasize Joe’s miscalculation in cutting Kathy out of the brothers’ lives entirely. On a more practical level, the constant question of how best to care for Jeremy also drives the plot forward at key points, facilitating Joe’s eventual reconciliation with his mother. When Joe finally brings Jeremy into Kathy’s apartment, Jeremy greets her without ceremony, saying, “Hi, Mom” as if the intervening years had been nothing more than a misunderstanding. His easy reentry into Kathy’s life implicates Joe in a way that no explicit argument ever could.

Kathy, Joe and Jeremy’s mother, has a long history of addiction to alcohol and methamphetamine, and her choice to live with abusive boyfriends eventually led Joe to remove Jeremy from her home and become his brother’s guardian in order to protect Jeremy from further neglect and abuse. At the opening of the novel, she has been estranged from her sons for years, serving time in prison for possession of meth. However, she has since been in recovery and has been sober for four years. As part of her 12-step program, she writes Lila and Joe a letter seven months before the events of the novel begin, wishing to make amends. Lila reads the letter but keeps its existence a secret from Joe until just before he goes to Buckley to investigate his father’s murder.

Only later in the novel does Joe finally discover that Kathy has turned her life around. She now takes lithium for her bipolar disorder and has been diagnosed with PTSD, which came from witnessing her mother burn to death in a car crash. She works as a bookkeeper for Terry Bremer, the same landlord who once evicted her. When Joe walks into her apartment, expecting to find the same volatile woman who screamed “I’ll fucking kill you” at the guardianship hearing (186), he instead finds a calm, healthy, level-headed woman who takes delight in her sons’ return to her home.

Her AA testimony stands as a measure of the progress she has made in her embrace of Recovery as a Daily Practice. She makes no excuses for herself when she tells the room that she once watched her boyfriend punch Jeremy and did not protect her son. She also admits that she “thought of [her] sons as stones around [her] neck” (203), and that the moment that broke her open was when she finally recalled a memory of eight-year-old Joe running back inside to fetch the winter coat she had failed to put on Jeremy. Astounded to hear true details from his mother instead of lies, Joe allows Jeremy to go to her, and the brothers begin a tentative reunion with their mother. Later, Kathy explains the daily struggle of her recovery, saying, “What you see here … this is me at my best. I get up every day and pray that I don’t mess it up again” (332). She keeps a photo of Joe holding an infant Jeremy so that she will never forget what her addiction cost her.

Charlie, Toke’s brother, proves himself to be a superficially charming predator whose thinly veiled malice includes an easy willingness to arrange murders. Even his public face is highly suspect, for as Joe notes, Charlie’s online presence is carefully curated to project an improbable degree of success. Charlie’s digital footprint is rife with photographs featuring him alongside politicians and celebrities, but his actual history includes the molestation of a six-year-old neighbor, Poppi Sanchez, when he was a teenager. Upon further research, Joe discovers that Charlie also collected a million-dollar insurance payout after his business partner died in a suspicious warehouse fire.

When he arrives in Buckley styled as a grieving uncle and immediately files for guardianship of Angel, a supposed niece he has never met, he tries to undermine Joe’s credibility even as he touts his own. His moves are calibrated to influence the legal decision-makers of the town of Buckley. By the time Bob Mullen describes Charlie to Joe, half the courthouse believes that Charlie is a benefactor and that Joe is a violent, grasping troublemaker. However, Charlie’s arson at the Caspen Inn finally forces him into the open, and he is arrested.

Vicky tends bar at the Snipe’s Nest, rides a Triumph motorcycle, and has put off college for years to care for her father Ray, whose grief over his wife’s death has led him to become addicted to alcohol. Upon Joe’s arrival in Buckley, she serves the practical role of providing him with crucial gossip about the various townspeople, and she also takes Joe to the site of Toke’s murder and explains what the scene looked like that night. She also reveals that Toke was the cause of her mother’s death; he ran her car off the bridge but was never charged because his truck conveniently disappeared the same night (104). Vicky lives across the street from the Hix farm and witnessed the aftermath of Toke’s murder and Angel’s overdose. Only in the novel’s climax does Joe finally realize that she is also Toke’s murderer. When Joe reviews Calder’s squad video frame by frame, he catches an image of her running across the lawn before her staged arrival on the motorcycle. When he presses her, she finally confesses that she entered the barn that night and tried to help the injured Toke, who merely cursed at her. As she tells Joe, “[Toke] killed my mom, and he was calling me a bitch? I couldn’t stop myself. I saw that gear lying there and…” (298).

The novel does not soften her crime, but it does give her grievance weight in the narrative, implying that Toke did not deserve to escape his demise. The ethics of the situation are further clouded by the fact that the man Vicky killed was minutes away from murdering Angel and staging her death as a suicide. Vicky escapes briefly to South Dakota but is caught when Ray’s recorded jail call gives her location away. She will face a county attorney who is unlikely to seek the maximum charge for her crime.