Danny and Ricky

Danny and Ricky’s relationship rests on an unusual combination of childhood trust, respect for personal boundaries, and a promise made across decades. When Danny finds her again, Ricky is an eleven-year-old refusing to return to Miles’s household; Danny cannot take her away, but he offers a future she can choose for herself. She later accepts that promise, asks him to marry her, and wakes from cold sleep in 2001 to find him waiting. Their relationship ends the novel not as an abstract pledge but as a marriage, with Pete beside them.

A Bond Built on Respect

Ricky greets Danny with a shout of “Uncle Danny!” and is delighted that he has brought Pete. Pete leaps from Danny’s arms into hers, and the two exchange their familiar cat protocols while Danny waits. The reunion’s intimacy is expressed through this small ritual as much as through speech: Ricky is glad Danny has come, and Pete is immediately at home with her.

Danny’s care for Ricky is notably restrained. He does not kiss or touch her, explaining that she dislikes unwanted physical attention and that their original relationship, formed when she was six, had been based on mutual respect for each other’s individuality and dignity. Their closeness therefore does not depend on possessiveness or conventional displays of affection. The ease of the greeting and Danny’s deliberate distance establish a bond in which affection includes attending to what the other person will accept.

Separation and Ricky’s Choice

The reunion takes place against the prospect of another separation. Ricky already knows Miles has married Belle; Miles has written to tell her. She then tells Danny, with grim resolve, that she will not go back. Though Danny sympathizes and says he would take her away if he could, he recognizes that she is eleven and Miles is her father. Ricky answers that Miles is not her real father and that her grandmother is coming to get her. Her refusal marks a decisive change in their relationship: Danny cannot simply restore the childhood closeness they had before, and Ricky must make her own way out of the household she rejects.

Danny’s offer of company is bound up with an act of repair. Ricky had been angry with him over Belle, and Danny admits that she was right and he was wrong. He insists that he is finished with Belle, then shows Ricky his certificate for all he owns in Hired Girl, Inc. and explains that he is giving it to her because he expects to be gone for a long time. When he realizes that a separate written assignment could be torn up by Belle, he abandons that method and works instead with the certificate’s standard assignment form. The financial gift is not merely a declaration of affection: Danny is trying to place something of value beyond Belle’s reach and provide for Ricky during the years he expects to be absent.

A Promise Across the Long Sleep

Ricky resists the gift. She says she will never touch it and, stroking Pete, protests that Pete would not leave her, while Danny is going to make him go. Danny asks whether she wants to see Pete and him again. When she says she does but believes it impossible because Danny plans to take the Long Sleep for thirty years, he turns the separation into a choice she may revisit. She is to live with her grandmother, go to school, and let the money accumulate; at twenty-one, if she still wants to see them, she will have enough to take the Long Sleep herself.

Danny makes the reunion specific rather than leaving it at the level of comfort. He promises that he and Pete will be waiting, and tells Ricky to arrange her sleep through Cosmopolitan Insurance Company at the Riverside Sanctuary in Riverside, with instructions to wake her on May 1, 2001. He has already prepared an envelope with the directions, so she need not rely on memory. Even the conditions of their future meeting are spelled out: if she wants Danny at her bedside when she wakes, she must leave word, because sanctuary rules would otherwise keep him in the waiting room. The carefully fixed date, place, and procedure give Ricky a future she can choose without requiring her to decide at eleven.

She studies the papers without touching them and asks whether Danny will really be there. He says that he will, whether she comes or not. Then, speaking so softly he can barely hear her, Ricky asks, “If I do . . . will you marry me?” Danny answers plainly that he will and that this is what he wants. Her question transforms the reunion plan: what had been a promise to wait becomes a promise of marriage, made before the long separation begins.

Reunion and Marriage

When Ricky wakes, her first words identify Danny and Pete: “Danny and Pete.” She raises her arms, and Danny sees that she is wearing his Tech class ring on her left thumb. The ring makes the interval between their parting and reunion visible in a single detail; she has kept a token of their bond through the years. Pete jumps onto the bed and greets her in an ecstasy of welcome, completing the promised reunion in the same three-person arrangement Ricky had feared losing.

Ricky refuses to stay overnight as the doctor wishes. Danny takes a cab with her to Brawley, where her grandmother had died in 1980 and where her former social ties have gradually disappeared. The old home town dazzles Ricky, and she holds Danny’s arm, but she does not succumb to the homesickness that makes waking from cold sleep hazardous; she wants to leave Brawley quickly. Danny arranges for the books she left in storage to be shipped to Aladdin in the care of John Sutton, then takes another cab with her to Yuma.

There Danny signs the county clerk’s book as Daniel Boone Davis, making clear which D. B. Davis had designed the work that brought them together. With Ricky’s small hand in his, he chokes over the marriage vows. Pete serves as best man, and courthouse witnesses are gathered for the ceremony. They leave Yuma at once for a guest ranch near Tucson, where their cabin has its own Eager Beaver so they need not see anyone. Pete’s fight with the ranch’s resident tomcat is the one inconvenience Danny recalls; Ricky takes to married life as if she had invented it. The delayed reunion thus resolves not by erasing the years apart, but by fulfilling the specific promise Danny made before them: Ricky wakes to find Danny and Pete there, and the pair marry.