47 pages • 1-hour read
Three Days in June
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Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.
Part 3: “The Day After”
Part 3, Pages 113-146 Summary
Gail wakes up the morning after Debbie’s wedding thinking about a man named Andrew Mason. She’d fallen in love with him the year Debbie was in fifth grade. He was an admissions counselor at the school where she taught math. She reflects now that they might have become friends and that he could have even been friends with Max. However, that is not the way things progressed.
He was a new hire that year, and he and Gail ran into each other alone most of the time. Neither spent much time congregating with the other faculty and staff, and their relationship grew without public scrutiny. One day, they were both forced to acknowledge the sexual tension, and their relationship became physical from there. They arranged to go to Andrew’s at a time when she could get away from Max and Debbie. Initially, they were awkward, but then they bonded over their shared love of ironing. Andrew was a neat, tidy man, and he valued having a clean, orderly space. The ice broke, and they had sex for the first time.
After that, they met whenever they could. Their options were limited: Gail refused to sleep with him at her house. Andrew once asked if Gail had thought about making their relationship permanent and leaving Max. Gail had thought about it; she wanted nothing more than to build a life with him, but there was Debbie to consider. She wasn’t sure if she could break apart her family.
Things proceeded without incident for a while, but one day, Debbie got injured at gymnastics while Gail was out with Andrew. Max took her to the emergency room, and afterward, Gail was consumed by guilt, wondering how she could have been having sex with another man when her family needed her.
That night, she emailed Andrew to say that they couldn’t see each other again. The next morning, she went to school as usual and was surprised when Max showed up. She’d left her email open on the computer. Max asked point-blank if she was having an affair. Initially, she denied it, but then she apologized. He asked if she was leaving him, and she responded with an adamant “no.” Later, she attempted to speak with him again, but he told her that he was “bushed.”
In the days and weeks that followed, he never brought it up. He acted somewhat normal, although she noticed that he no longer doted on her. She deserved that, she thought. She and Andrew became strangers, and she was relieved when he began dating the Spanish teacher. In retrospect, she couldn’t understand why she became involved with him and concluded that it was precisely because she knew so little about him.
Gail wakes up, realizing that she must have fallen asleep again while thinking about Max and Andrew. Max is already up, tells her about his dream, and then offers to make breakfast. The two chat amiably, and then Debbie calls. Gail almost asks her if anything is wrong but then catches herself. She graciously tells Debbie that the wedding was beautiful. Debbie chats with both Gail and Max before hanging up, and then Max asks if Gail still goes on her Sunday walk. He’d like to accompany her, and she realizes that she would welcome the company.
She thinks back to their divorce. Her father died after a protracted illness, and Gail was stunned. She grieved much harder than her mother, who was better prepared for the event.
Gail’s father left her enough to buy a small house, and she immediately told Max that she was going to move out. Max was stunned, and Gail wasn’t able to provide him with a real explanation. She tried to tell him that in the wake of her affair, his feelings for her had shifted. They’d never actually had a real conversation about her behavior, and she couldn’t take the way that they’d just buried everything. However, he didn’t seem to understand. It was difficult after he moved out; he was angry and bitter. They bickered about Debbie.
By the time she was a teenager, Debbie saw Max less. She wanted to stop seeing him entirely when he got a girlfriend. However, she gradually warmed to the woman, although the relationship didn’t last. Eventually, Gail and Max settled into a more amicable routine.
Part 3, Pages 147-165 Summary
Max and Gail continue their walk. Gail ruminates on the difficulties of getting older, and Max assures her that he is in the same boat: Aging is difficult. He makes a cryptic comment about how they’d once planned to grow old together, and Gail is unsure of how to respond, so she says nothing.
Following a suggestion from Max, Gail calls Marilee to wish her luck with her procedure. Marilee thanks her for the well-wishes and asks if she would consider a position teaching remedial math at their school. Gail tells her that she’ll think about it and relays the news to Max. Max then explains that he also inquired about a position for Gail teaching remedial math at the school where he works. It seems that she now has two job offers. Max’s school would necessitate a move, however, and Gail is not sure if she is up for that.
Gail asks if Max would like to stay for lunch, and the two decide to go to the Cultured Crab, a restaurant that Max has always enjoyed. Gail is not as fond of it: The Cultured Crab specializes in creative combinations that are not to her taste. Still, the restaurant evokes memories, and she is happy to be there. They discuss past dinners and reflect that a young relative who was not even born when they once ate there is now getting gray hairs. Gail asks Max if he remembers people tapping their watches, and the two further reminisce about how strange it is that so many decades have passed since they first met. Max comments that the past three days have felt like traveling back in time together. He shares that he thinks they’ve been given a chance to get it right again, like the movie Groundhog Day. Gail isn’t sure that they’ve succeeded, though she agrees that the parallels are there: He showed up uninvited with a pet just as he did decades ago when he moved into her house. Jared also made an appearance, and Gail had a job crisis.
After lunch, they return to Gail’s house. The cat greets them, and Gail realizes that she does want to adopt it. She names it Celine. Max is thrilled and tells her that he will email the adoption paperwork. She asks if he would like to stay longer, but he says that he has to be getting back home. Wistfully, she says goodbye. She calls her mother, and the two make loose plans to get together.
Gail feels simultaneously too old and too young. She knows that she’s aging, but she’s also not sure what to do with the rest of her life and wishes that there were an adult around to tell her. She sits down with Celine, who is happily purring, and wishes she had been more forthcoming with Max. Suddenly, the doorbell rings: Max has returned to suggest that they put both their names on the cat’s adoption papers, arguing that this will make the logistics easier. Struck by the fact that Max returned to say this in person rather than simply calling, Gail takes his face in her hands and kisses him.
Part 3 Analysis
Part 3 clarifies Gail’s marital indiscretion that the narrative alludes to in Part 2, and in doing so, Tyler further develops The Impact of Personal Crises on Self-Perception. Gail reveals that when Debbie was young, she had an affair with a co-worker named Andrew. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, Gail understands more about this affair and Max’s responses to it than she once did. Her reflections about the event are a key part of the emotional growth that she undergoes as a character and help create a more in-depth portrait of who she is. Gail’s isolated nature has been an important focal point throughout the novel. She has made it clear that she finds little in common with most people; it is evident both from the formality of her working relationships and from her lack of personal friends that Gail is not embedded within a strong social network. Her connection with Andrew, however, was intense enough that she seriously contemplated what it would be like to live with him:
I thought about it a lot. I thought about waking up with him every morning, going to sleep with him every night, weaving my life into that measured, considered routine of his where the potted plants descended the steps in the proper order, and everything happened according to a plan. I ached for it (124).
Yet when the affair ended, Gail concluded that she had never really known Andrew in any deep sense and that this was likely part of his appeal; she could project freely without the complications and annoyances born of real familiarity. In the narrative present, Gail reaches a somewhat different conclusion: She did “know” Andrew, but only because she “was him.” She continues, saying, “I had recognized his separateness, and his held-back smile, and his absolute certainty that since he took his own coffee black, there was no need whatsoever to set out cream and sugar for anybody else” (164). As her tone indicates, however, the qualities she was drawn to in Andrew are not necessarily ones that make for a sustainable relationship. They are also not ones that she admires in herself; as she reflects on Max’s departure at the end of the novel, she berates herself for not speaking more clearly about her feelings, asking, “Oh, why was I so bottled up?” (164).
Instead, the novel suggests that her relationship with Max, frustrating as it sometimes was, entailed a greater degree of intimacy and compatibility. His commitment to forgiveness moves her, and she grudgingly realizes that his approach to Debbie’s situation with Kenneth is superior to hers. Considering both her re-assessment of Max’s past actions and her willingness to recognize his kindness and empathy in the present, their entire relationship changes. This allows the author to explore their relationship’s complexity in even more nuance: Gail and Max’s relationship, years after their divorce, evolves once again. Their easy camaraderie during the walk and at lunch speaks to the depth of their connection and foreshadows Max’s return at the end of the novel. Although Tyler does not specify exactly what their renewed connection will entail, the references to Groundhog Day imply a fresh start. It is part of The Complexities of Familial Relationships that such relationships can seemingly end only to be reborn, the novel suggests.
Gail’s recalibration of her relationship with Max is not the only seismic shift that happens throughout the novel. By the time the narrative ends, she also is more ready to accept the idea of moving back into teaching. The rigid view that she’d held of her career has softened, especially given the positive feedback about her teaching that she receives from not only Max but also Marilee. In doing so, Gail shifts her perspective on The Nuances of Aging. She has gained greater self-acceptance and has learned that it is possible, even as she enters a new stage in life, to learn new things about herself and understand herself in new ways. That she reconsiders adopting Max’s foster cat and decides that she might enjoy taking care of the creature speaks to this recalibration: She hadn’t seen herself as someone who wanted to caretake in the same way that she hadn’t seen herself working as a teacher again. Gail ends the novel with the realization that her identity is not fixed but more akin to “becoming.” Gail can still grow, change, and evolve even as she enters older age.
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