Rodney, Don’s 78-year-old husband, is the novel’s dual protagonist. His gruff exterior conceals reservoirs of emotion that are deeply felt but not often expressed. Klune characterizes him initially through silence: He communicates through expressions, “his bushy eyebrows doing most of his talking for him […] and Don could tell what he was thinking without a word between them” (1). This taciturn quality positions Rodney as a foil to Don’s more verbal processing, though as the novel progresses, Rodney emerges as a round, dynamic figure whose climactic confessions illustrate his desire to be vulnerable. His lifetime of work in a thankless bureaucratic job and his pride in changing a tire without assistance establish a man whose identity is bound to competence and stoic self-reliance.

Throughout much of the novel, Klune defines Rodney through his protective nature. He reveals his protectiveness as he steps in front of Don when strangers approach or squeezes his hand in silent warning. His confession near the end of their journey that he both loved and hated Jeremy for the harm Jeremy caused, reveals a desire to shield Don from his painful emotions, opening up a decade of compartmentalized grief. His capacity for unexpected tenderness, visible in his impromptu officiation of Pantomime and Juniper’s wedding, reinforces the deep love and connection between himself and Rodney.

Rodney’s conversation with Becca and Amy foregrounds the novel’s thematic interest in Queer History as a Tool for Survival, positioning it as a legacy passed down from one generation to the next in the LGBTQIA+ community. His extended monologue about Stonewall’s antecedents, the Reagan administration’s neglect during the AIDS crisis, and his friends that lost their lives to the disease, situate Amy and Becca’s personal struggles within a broader history of discrimination and resilience, establishing him as a living archive. His insistence that the community survived its own apocalypses contextualizes his determination to keep moving toward Copper Mountain. In the novel’s final moments, Rodney tells Don to keep looking at him as the wave of fire approaches, redirecting his lifelong protective instinct into a final gesture of presence rather than concealment. By voicing the grief he has carried silently for years and asking Don to stay with him in the open rather than hide from what is coming, Rodney lets himself be a partner who shares pain rather than absorbs it alone.

Jeremy, Don and Rodney’s adopted son, remains unnamed until the novel’s final chapters—a mystery that serves as the engine for Don and Rodney’s end-of-the-world road trip. Adopted at seven from foster care, with diagnoses including post-traumatic stress disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, and later schizoaffective disorder, Jeremy is rendered as a round, tragic figure whose interiority Klune reveals through Don and Rodney’s memories and specific, tactile details: a stretched Mickey Mouse shirt collar he pulled when distressed, his attachment to Where the Wild Things Are, his demand for waffles with peanut butter on his first night in their home, and a plasma ball he begged for and later shattered against a wall.

Jeremy’s psychological complexity resists reduction to diagnosis. The novel depicts the lived texture of his struggle with mental illness through cycles of calm and connection followed by violent outbursts, holes kicked into walls, stolen possessions, and disappearances. His final letter, found beside his body after a fatal overdose, describes how unbearable his internal experience had become and conveys love for his fathers even at his most desperate. Klune treats this death with restraint, neither romanticizing it nor reducing Jeremy’s life to a cautionary tale. Jeremy’s weaponization of an antigay slur as a teenager, illustrates how cruelty absorbed from the outside world entered the household, complicating but not negating the family’s love.

Jeremy’s ashes, divided into seven vials and distributed at sites the family visited together, emphasizing The Consuming Nature of Grief. When the final ash cloud briefly takes the shape of Jeremy’s face above the fire tower, Rodney and Don feel briefly reconnected to their son as the world comes to an end.

Amelia, an 18-year-old girl that Don and Rodney find on the road, appears in a single extended sequence that foregrounds novel’s exploration of character and ethics in times of crisis. Klune characterizes her through a flat, monotone monologue that unspools across pages, describing her first kiss, her boyfriend Chris’s death in a car accident, and her murder of seven ranch hands, her parents, and a visiting family of three, in the same affectless register that suggests dissociation following compounded trauma: the loss of Chris, the announcement of planetary doom, and her conviction that mercy required action.

Drawing on her father’s descriptions of slaughterhouse cattle being funneled toward their deaths, Amelia concludes that humanity is similarly herded, and that ending lives swiftly is the only protection against the suffering she imagines coming. Her cow-eyed gaze, noted by Don with horror, completes the visual comparison she has constructed for herself. The detail that she could not turn the gun on herself, despite repeated attempts, reveals the limits of her reasoning and points toward a survival instinct she cannot escape. Her offer to ease Don and Rodney’s suffering, delivered in the same gentle cadence as her account of breakfast tacos, shows how thoroughly grief and isolation have eroded her moral perception.

Amelia stands as the novel’s counterpoint to characters like Pantomime and Jerri, who face annihilation through connection rather than destruction. Her presence continues to weigh on Don and Rodney after they leave, as Don tells Rodney that some people seem to carry an emptiness inside them that consumes everything good.

Pantomime and Juniper, a young couple encountered at a roadside caravan in Ohio, represents the novel’s philosophy of communal celebration in the face of extinction. Introduced barefoot and wearing flowers in their hair, they greet Don and Rodney with immediate hospitality, offering wine, chili, and a place by the fire, positioning the caravan as a portrait of communal joy. 

Pantomime’s commentary on the Golden Record aboard the Voyager filled with sounds and images of human culture poses existential questions about how humanity deserves to be remembered. Her questions, posed without bitterness, highlights the tension between human cruelty and human beauty. Her marriage to Juniper, officiated by Rodney gives the older couple an opportunity to witness and celebrate young love. Juniper’s parting whisper to Rodney, instructing him to love Don forever, reaffirms the deep love between the novel’s two protagonists.

Amy and Becca, a young lesbian couple that Don and Rodney meet at a Montana campground, embrace Don and Rodney as their queer elders and reflect back a version of the older couple’s younger selves. Amy, raised in Texas Christianity and nearly subjected to conversion practices, recounts her escape with Becca at 15, their years of precarious housing and estrangement from her family. Becca, more guarded and direct, provides a steady counterweight to Amy’s exuberance. Amy’s insistence on the word elders rather than old, and her belief that the best revenge any queer person can have is to be happy, reframes survival as both political and personal. 

They embrace Rodney’s stories about his life and his account of the history of the LGBTQIA+ community as a cultural inheritance. His explanation that “it’s LGBT when it used to be GLBT [because] an honor bestowed upon lesbians […] They filled the hospitals, the streets, they cried out in horror at the treatment of the dying […] Never forget that. When we were abandoned by the world, it was the women from our community who held our hands as we passed” (96), acts as encouragement and affirmation of Becca and Amy’s identities and the legacy of which they are apart. Their chosen family parallels the broader history Rodney describes, suggesting continuity across generations of queer resilience.

Jerri, a Black woman living alone with her dog in a remote Washington cabin, appears late in the novel during the final stage of Don and Rodney’s journey. Her physical description, tall and broad with tight braids, layered work clothing, and dusty boots, signals self-sufficiency. Her characterization centers on the deliberate solitude she has chosen after extracting herself from a harmful past. Her admission that hardly anyone out where she lives looks like her, paired with her statement that she sought absolution by leaving, prompts Rodney and Don to consider form absolution might take for them. 

Jerri interprets the behavior of the animals that gathering nightly on her land in concentric circles to look up at the sky as evidence that humanity may be an infection the universe is correcting. This perspective sits alongside her acknowledgment that humans nonetheless made art and music and love. This capacity to hold both the good and the bad of humanity at once positions her as a philosophical counterpart to Pantomime, more skeptical but equally generous. Her decision to give Don and Rodney her truck, asking only that they witness the animals first, reflects the selflessness the novel associates with characters who have made peace with the end.