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Summary
Chapters 11-14
Chapter 11, Budget Cuts
Calvin and Six-Thirty jog through a neighborhood that is peppered with evidence of budget cuts on police services. As they pass the police station, Six-Thirty is uneasy about the police cars, which often back out quickly without seeming to care what’s behind them. Suddenly, a series of loud noises that sound like gunshots startle Calvin and Six-Thirty. The dog bolts, and because Calvin is holding the leash, he’s pulled along too. In the confusion, Calvin slips on motor oil and falls, cracking his head on the pavement. A patrol car then accidentally runs over him, injuring him fatally. The policemen rush to try and help, but Calvin is badly hurt and whispers "Six-Thirty" before losing consciousness. The chapter ends with Six-Thirty, also injured, shocked, and heartbroken, leaving to “inform” Elizabeth that Calvin is dead.
Chapter 12, Calvin’s Parting Gift
Elizabeth blames herself for buying the leash that led to Calvin’s death, going over and over how things could have gone differently. Her mourning destroys the routines of her daily life. She's unable to sleep or eat and is hounded by harassing calls from a mortician. At the funeral home, she brings Calvin's rowing clothes to bury him in instead of a suit. The mortician refuses to do this and secretly changes him into an old suit, which he charges Elizabeth for. Calvin’s funeral is well-attended but not everyone is there to mourn; a lot of people are just morbidly curious. Elizabeth is barely hanging on, and so an unpleasant interaction with a reporter at the funeral is especially tense. She leaves the funeral early and walks home.
Back at work, she goes into Calvin’s lab and finds it stripped clean of almost everything. His lunchbox is still there, though, and it contains a diamond ring in a blue box. Frask, the office personnel manager, enters the room and speaks to Elizabeth about some changes: she won’t be in this lab, she only gets five days of bereavement leave, and she can’t bring Six-Thirty to work. Frask disapproves intensely of Elizabeth and Calvin’s relationship and makes that clear. She also, after taking a closer look at Elizabeth, informs the grieving woman that she’s pregnant.
Chapter 13, Idiots
Hastings finds itself facing financial concerns after Calvin dies. With the threat of funding cuts looming due to the negative newspaper article that was published after Evans’s funeral, Donatti is panicking. It doesn’t help that Calvin and Elizabeth are two of the only innovators in the field working at Hastings, and Elizabeth is about to be let go. The Hastings staff know that Elizabeth is pregnant after Frask told everyone. They don’t want to employ her, but they can’t keep the funding the Parker foundation provides for abiogenesis research if no-one can continue her work. None of the people she works with can do the project without her, even though one of them, a young man named Boryweitz, insists he actually did all the work himself. Donatti and Frask call Elizabeth into an office and fire her for being pregnant. She tries to fight them on it, but it doesn’t help.
Chapter 14, Grief
Six-Thirty visits the cemetery where Calvin is buried and steals daffodils to place on his grave. Elizabeth is queasy with grief for Calvin and with her developing pregnancy. She smashes up her kitchen in order to build a laboratory, and makes money by charging her former colleagues for help with their work. Back in the graveyard, Six-Thirty protects a man from bleeding out after a cantankerous groundskeeper shoots at him. Six-Thirty becomes a local hero and gets an article in the local paper written about him.
Analysis
Elizabeth sees an article praising Six-Thirty in the paper and takes a closer look at it. The bullet that missed Six-Thirty has clipped the writing on Calvin’s tombstone. Formerly, it read “Your days are numbered.” This wasn’t the quote that Elizabeth wanted, but there wasn’t room to write the entire thing—"Your days are numbered. Use them to throw the windows of your soul open to the sun.”— so the unnerving version was what they got, serving as a grim reminder of how short Calvin’s life was. When the bullet destroys the letters “mbered,” leaving the phrase “Your days are nu,” Elizabeth takes it as a positive sign from the universe. Calvin’s mantra as a lonely, angry child was “every day is new.” It was supposed to remind him not to get stuck in the past, as he tended to ruminate. This unintentional edit of the headstone turns an unpleasant engraving mistake into a message of hope for Elizabeth. It’s as though Calvin is speaking to her from beyond the grave, reminding her that her days are still “nu” even though he’s gone.
The family units in this novel don’t stay static, and members often break off into smaller groups to later reconvene. Calvin and Six-Thirty are good examples of this. Although it’s Elizabeth who finds the dog, he and Calvin develop a loving relationship quickly and permanently. Six-Thirty’s guilt at being too afraid to sniff out bombs is soothed a little by the idea that he can protect his new family. Calvin also feels that the dog is part of his bond with Elizabeth. Although it’s implied that he wasn’t being completely truthful about not wanting children, Six-Thirty is a key element of the family life Calvin hoped to one day build with her. He wants to be “three of us,” as he said in the previous section, and Six-Thirty appears to be very satisfied with the arrangement.
Six-Thirty’s reaction to Calvin’s calamitous fall and subsequent crushing by the squad car reveals that his emotions are at least as developed as those of the humans in the novel. He demonstrates a level of empathy and understanding that transcends species. He knows that Calvin is dying of his injuries, but when he realizes he can’t help him, he immediately turns his thoughts to Elizabeth. Because Six-Thirty also knows Elizabeth is pregnant, his grief over Calvin’s death and his feelings of shame and guilt about his role in it overwhelm him. He feels he has ruined everything, and his despair makes Calvin’s death all the more heartbreaking.
Grief is a harsh teacher for Elizabeth. This is the second time in her life that, after establishing a young male counterpart as the center of her world, that person has been brutally dragged from her by unexpected death. It seems like a cruel joke that she would lose first her brother, and then Calvin. She also doesn’t know how to handle the many social niceties surrounding death in 1960s America, and chooses to bury Calvin in his rowing clothes because she feels they’re the most appropriate. The fact that the undertaker doesn’t fulfil this request—instead stuffing Calvin’s body into an ancient suit and charging her for it—just adds insult to injury. She feels like she’s drowning, and the weight of her current situation—her pregnancy, Calvin’s death, and her sudden total isolation—threatens to crush her.
Instead of collapsing, however, Elizabeth decides to redirect her misery into productivity. It’s a renewed work ethic that feels strongly aligned with the gender-based violence that Hastings does to her in this section. When she’s fired for being pregnant, she goes home and starts to smash up the kitchen, the site most traditionally associated with women’s oppression. As she destroys the kitchen so she can replace it with a lab, she’s trying to forge a path forward. Even if she didn’t know Calvin “for long enough,” she has his legacy to protect and his unborn child to raise. We also see this refusal to give up articulated as Elizabeth begins to charge her incompetent Hastings colleagues for her expertise—a move signaling her refusal to be subjugated by her circumstances. If they aren’t going to have her in the lab they own, they will have to pay for her thoughts and corrections in the lab she makes.
