Van Go begins working for the Daltons after being dismissed from his previous job, but the position is defined from the outset by a divide between the opportunity offered and the use he intends to make of it. Lois arranges work for him at the home of Mr. Dalton, where he is to clean the pool area, trim the grass, sweep, cut bushes, and wash cars. Van Go accepts, yet privately treats the wages as a means to buy a gun and steal from the household. The scene makes employment a precarious opening into a wealthier world—and, in his imagination, a step toward crime.

From Dismissal to a New Address

Van Go’s approach to the Dalton household follows a blunt rejection at his former workplace. Reynolds has called him lazy and told others to send him away; when Van Go asks whether he has been fired, the answer confirms that there is no job for him there. Big Jim appears ready to hit him, but Reynolds stops him and orders Van Go to leave. Faced with Big Jim’s clenched fists, Van Go walks away without further protest. The immediate consequence is practical: he needs another source of money.

He goes to the address his mother gave him, hoping to work for a couple of days, buy a gun, and then make a larger score. His imagined future extends as far as Mexico, but the first step is a job. That sequence matters: Van Go does not approach the position as a change in ambition or a decision to abandon theft. He looks for work because he believes it can finance the next stage of the plan already forming in his mind.

Lois’s Introduction and the Dalton Household

The address leads to a large house on a hill, reached by a circular driveway and marked by expensive cars. Van Go notices a red BMW convertible with a white roof, so spotless that it seems untouched by dust; its license plate reads COOL. Before he can find the doorbell, a man in a pink shirt and khakis opens the door. Van Go says he has come about a job, and Lois then comes forward and recognizes him as Sadie Jenkins’s son.

Lois explains the connection to Mr. Dalton: she had told him about the son of her friend Sadie and had been given permission to hire someone for the pool area and lawn when Felipe was absent. Mr. Dalton remembers the arrangement, shakes Van Go’s hand, and leaves in a Mercedes, telling Lois he will return late and that she should not wait dinner. The scene establishes that this is not a formal application detached from personal ties; Van Go is being admitted because Lois trusts Sadie enough to give her son a chance.

The household also overturns Van Go’s expectation of who might possess such wealth. He is stunned by the scale of the house and by the fact that Mr. Dalton is Black. The polished cars, fine furniture, paintings, and vases make affluence visible to him as a concentrated display of valuable things. His attention to these surroundings is consequential: even before he agrees to work, he is already imagining them as objects he might steal.

Terms of the Job and Van Go’s Intentions

After Mr. Dalton leaves, Lois’s manner changes. She tells Van Go that Sadie has spoken about him and stresses that the opportunity comes because Sadie is her friend. She asks whether he wants the job; Van Go admits that he does not know what it involves. Lois specifies the work: sweeping, cutting bushes and grass, and washing cars. These are ordinary maintenance tasks, not an invitation into the household’s private affairs, and Lois makes clear that keeping the position depends on doing what he promises.

Van Go looks around at the furnishings and decorations while thinking about the gun he intends to buy with his earnings. He then imagines returning to steal from the house. His answer that he can do the work therefore carries a private qualification: he accepts the job’s labor while concealing from Lois the purpose he has assigned to the money and the property around him. The contrast does not require him to state his plan aloud; the narration supplies it directly, placing the reader inside the gap between the employer’s offer and Van Go’s design.

Significance and Narrative Frame

The hiring brings Van Go from an exposed failure at one workplace to a conditional chance in a household whose wealth immediately attracts his attention. Lois’s friendship with Sadie opens the door, while the job’s defined duties and warning establish a boundary Van Go may not intend to respect. Nothing in this scene confirms that he carries out the imagined theft; it establishes the intention as he accepts the work, rather than reporting a completed crime.

The event belongs to Van Go’s embedded first-person narrative, not to the novel’s impersonal account of its other characters. His vernacular voice presents the job both as an immediate necessity and as an instrument in a larger scheme. The scene’s dramatic tension comes from that double meaning: to Lois, the position is a favor and a chance for Van Go to prove himself; to Van Go, its wages and the Dalton household’s visible possessions are already entangled with his plan to obtain a gun and steal.