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It didn’t seem to matter to Turtle, she was happy where she was. . . . She watched the dark highway and entertained me with her vegetable-soup song, except that now there were people mixed in with the beans and potatoes: Dwayne Ray, Mattie, Esperanza, Lou Ann and all the rest. And me. I was the main ingredient.

These lines recount Taylor’s thoughts at the end of the novel, in Chapter Seventeen, as she and Turtle head back to Tucson. With this final scene, Kingsolver provides a mirror image of Taylor’s first trip to Tucson with Turtle, during which the little girl’s behavior was entirely different. On the first trip, Turtle remained so silent and motionless that Turtle wondered if she had died. On this trip, Turtle remains wide awake, happily babbling about her vegetables. Most important, Turtle now includes names of people in her vegetable-soup song. This marks a change, because in the beginning, Turtle could not connect with people or form ties to them. By adding names of people she knows to her babble, Turtle shows she has begun to recover from her history of abuse and has gained the ability to trust people. Most significant is that she identifies Taylor as the “main ingredient.” For a space of time, Turtle demonstrated her confusion about her caretakers by calling most women in her life “Ma.” Now, she identifies Taylor as her mother. The last sentence of this quotation reaffirms not only Turtle’s attachment to Taylor, but also Taylor’s happiness in hearing herself identified as the main ingredient, and her confidence in herself as a mother.

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