Nancy

Nancy is Karen Barbour’s mother, Don’s wife of more than fifty years, and the lively center of a family whose adult children remain close enough to gather regularly at her home. She is described as vivacious, handsome, gentle, and imposing, with gray eyes and silver hair cut in a pageboy. Her presence carries two contrasting currents through the book: the warmth of family ritual and a persistent attention to dangers that no family can fully prevent.

Identity and Family Life

Nancy and Don live in a barnlike, board-and-batten house tucked into a wooded canyon about half an hour from Inverness. Their three children live no farther away than San Francisco. On an ordinary afternoon, one or more may be found at the kitchen table with their mother, talking over reheated coffee and cookies. The regularity of these visits gives Nancy’s home the character of a family meeting place, not merely a setting for occasional holidays.

Nancy works in the garden every day. Don, a retired doctor, grows tomatoes and squash in its terraces, while much of his working time goes to evaluating studies of new medicines. The account distinguishes their routines without presenting the household as a formal arrangement: the garden and the kitchen are shared surroundings for a family whose members continue to spend time together. Nancy’s daily work outdoors accompanies the ease with which her children return to her table.

The House and Wednesday Dinners

The house’s main room is cavernous and airy, with a single-pane plate-glass door twenty-four feet high that slides open. Floor-to-ceiling shelves along two walls hold books about shells, rocks, trees, and birds. Family portraits share the space with sand dollars, pewter plates, and a painting of a marmot. These details make the home feel both expansive and particular: its scale is striking, but its shelves and objects register the interests and history of the people who live there.

Every Wednesday, Karen Barbour and the narrator bring themselves and the dogs to dinner with Nancy and Don. The evenings gather the couple’s three children, their families, occasional guests, and a shifting pack of dogs that takes the best couches and steals unattended food. The gatherings are described as raucous and memorable. Their repetition matters: week after week, the family returns to a shared table even as circumstances elsewhere in the narrative change.

Nancy’s kitchen is organized around a large wooden island with a six-burner range, usually occupied by something cooking. The meals vary widely: yellow chicken curry with jasmine rice, cucumber raita, mango chutney, and cardamom flatbread; a bubbling casserole with green chilies and cheese; or roast pork with lemons and prunes, crispy potatoes, and Brussels sprouts fried with pancetta. The grandchildren choose ceramic plates decorated with different animals. Jasper Sheff always chooses the whale; Daisy Sheff and a cousin compete for the dog plate until Daisy gives way and chooses the donkey. The food, the children’s small preferences, and the busy room make hospitality tangible rather than abstract.

Warnings and Vigilance

At dinner, Nancy often recounts newspaper or television reports about threats to children. Her accounts range from toxic mattresses and poisoning to teen suicide, shark attacks, car crashes, and electrocution. She tells the family of a swimmer who drowned after holding her breath too long and of a person killed when a tree fell on his car. She also reports rising rates of childhood depression, eating disorders, and drug abuse. On one occasion, she describes a girl drowning after her hair becomes caught in a hot-tub drain, explaining that she wants the family to be careful.

The narrator understands these reports as attempts to increase vigilance, but also observes that no one can prepare for every possible calamity. Safety is necessary; panic and excessive caution can become stifling. Nancy’s warnings therefore do not make her simply a figure of fear: they arise within a family life marked by care, meals, and regular companionship. Yet their recurrence gives the dinners an undertow. Bad news arrives alongside the food, making the effort to protect children feel both loving and impossible to complete.

Place in the Family Narrative

Nancy’s home becomes a point of continuity across the family’s changing circumstances. At one Wednesday dinner, she listens while Nic Sheff launches into a stream of disconnected, fervent opinions about sex, monogamy, and Dr. Seuss. The contrast between his agitated talk and Nancy’s attention as she stirs a pot locates the episode within an otherwise familiar gathering; the scene shows her receiving him without turning the dinner into a confrontation.

She and Don also bring Nic to the hospital to meet Jasper Sheff when the baby is only a few hours old. Nic sits beside Karen Barbour’s hospital bed in a pink upholstered chair, holds his blanket-wrapped brother, and stares at him for a long time. Nancy’s presence in bringing him there places her within the family’s effort to make room for a new child and to preserve bonds across households. Taken together, these moments define her less through a separate plot of her own than through the domestic spaces she helps sustain: an open, crowded home, a recurring dinner table, and a family gathering around children whose safety and place in that family remain matters of concern.