Maggie and Ira decide to have dinner with their son Jesse , his ex-wife Fiona, and their daughter Leroy, and the five of them discover that the truth hurts. Fiona and Jesse divorced about seven years ago, and Fiona and Leroy literally ran out of the house and never came back. This dinner was their first time meeting since the incident. They were young when they married, less than twenty years old, and very naive. Jesse had promised to make a cradle for Leroy, but never did. At one part, Fiona said to Jesse, ” ‘I married you for that cradle.’ ” She left because she figured he would never keep any other promises in their marriage.
When I was little, I used to watch this TV show all the time. At the end of each episode, when Scooby and the gang caught whatever villain they were after, the villain would say something along the lines of, “If it weren’t for you meddling kids…” This reminds me of the way Maggie is always meddling in the lives of the people she loves. She tries to get to the bottom of the mysteries in her life, but unfortunately, unlike Scooby, she does more harm than good.
At the beginning of the novel, Maggie and Ira are on a road trip to Deer Lick, Pennsylvania for a funeral. Along the way, they experience some turbulence in their relationship. Maggie continues to claim that she is divorcing Ira because he doesn’t respect her, and he nags at her about her interference in everyone else’s lives. They also spend a lot of time following a road map of the northeastern United States, but it fails to keep them on track. This shows that no matter how planned out everything in life might be, there is always something that changes or doesn’t go according to plan.
Ira works in a framing shop that has been owned by his family for three generations. It isn’t a glorious job, and he doesn’t make a lot of money. Maggie is very critical of his work, and at times it seems like she is almost trapped in a picture frame herself. She wants everything in her life to be concrete, and rarely ventures out of the four sides of her comfort zone. She is critical of others, but never critical of herself. She is almost trapped behind glass in the way that she looks at people and criticizes their faults and wrongdoings.
