Reminders of Him

It begins as a joke between Kenna and Scotty, hopelessly in love and just beginning to understand the depth of their feelings for each other: “It was bliss,” Kenna recalls, “a bliss we thought would last forever” (113). Browsing through an antiques store, Kenna and Scotty both see the same beautiful ring: “It was dainty and gold and looked like it belonged on the finger of someone straight out of the 1800s” (114). They are both impressed by the gorgeous ring: “It was honestly the prettiest ring I had ever seen” (114). However, because both are still in school and working minimum wage jobs, the $4000 price tag makes the ring a fantasy.

On their way out of the antiques shop, however, Scotty buys Kenna tiny novelty hands, rubber tips that go on each finger, each one with five fingers. They are a novelty gag gift, an impulse purchase kept in wire baskets near the registers. Kenna is surprised by the gift. She is tempted to laugh it off, but since that day, long after the accident, that gift means so much to her because it was Scotty’s last gift to her. When she plays with the silly fingertips, the hands seem to be waving goodbye: “It was by far the stupidest gift anyone had ever given me, but by far my favorite” (115).

The antique ring and the novelty rubber hands symbolize the young, unspoiled love between Kenna and Scotty. When Kenna dons the cheap rubber hands on her fingers, the two laugh and kiss—Scotty even kisses each of the fifty toy fingers. That moment encapsulates Kenna’s love, a moment at once silly and intense that will reveal the depth of her feeling only after the accident destroys that relationship: “We didn’t get to live our dream. And now we never will” (116).

In making her peace with Kenna, Grace reveals that Scotty, just before the accident, asked his parents to help him purchase the $4000 ring on the condition he would repay them. In gifting Kenna now with the ring, it becomes the symbol of Kenna and Scotty’s love that will always be an essential element of her life, even as Kenna moves into a new phase of her life and meets a new love. The ring symbolizes her past without the pain. Grace suggests that Kenna give the ring to Diem when it is time for her to marry. In this, the ring becomes a symbol of the enduring love between Scotty and Kenna, a love expressed in the spirit of Diem.

The novel begins and ends with the wooden cross Grace staked into the ground near the site of the accident. The cross bears only the inscription of the date of Scotty’s death. Certain that Scotty would have hated such a public display of emotions and equally certain that his mother had the idea for the wayside cross, Kenna stops the cab as she goes into town and pulls up the cross. She defies Scotty’s mother who has made clear to Kenna she is not welcome in her daughter’s life.

In a novel that explores the dynamics of grief, how death upends a family, and how each member then struggles to understand that loss, the wayside cross symbolizes that process. It marks the site where Scotty died, particularly powerful given the details that emerge only after the accident: Kenna left Scotty because she thought he was already dead, but he was still alive and bled to death over the course of six hours.

The wayside cross symbolizes Grace’s unmanageable grief; she revisits and refuels her sorrow every time she passes it. That endless grief will keep the wounds fresh and the pain vivid. At this point, both Kenna and Grace are filled with negativity—Grace blaming Kenna for the tragedy, and Kenna seeing in Grace someone committed to keeping her from her child. The cross perpetuates that hostility and those negative feelings, hence Kenna’s brazen theft of the cross in broad daylight, one that even the cab driver cautions her is “bad karma” (2).

The novel closes with Kenna returning the wayside cross, which measures her emotional growth. The past cannot be forgotten, but it can be put in a restorative context. Because the two have found their way to empathize with each other, restoring the memorial now suggests a strategy for living in the moment but never allowing the past to slip into shadows. The cross will now remind Grace and Kenna to enjoy those happy memories of Scotty gone too soon. As Kenna decides on the way back from returning the memorial cross, “Now that I have forgiven myself, the reminders of [Scotty] only make me smile” (318).