Delphine and Roy’s father-daughter relationship

Delphine and Roy’s father-daughter relationship is marked by a persistent contradiction: Roy loves his daughter, yet she has spent much of her life cleaning up after him and enduring the consequences of his drinking. Their bond is neither simple estrangement nor uncomplicated devotion. Delphine’s practical care repeatedly brings them close, while her clear-eyed anger and hope that he might change remain in tension. His sobriety after Eva’s death becomes a genuine, if fragile, interval of domestic kindness; his return to drinking and his death force Delphine to confront both the affection she has preserved and the years she cannot recover.

A Daughter’s Long Familiarity

Roy is not presented as a violent or rampaging drunk. He can tell an engaging story, and it is well known that he loves Delphine, even though she has put up with more than a daughter should have to. That love coexists with a history of neglect: Roy had rarely sat and spoken with her with the gravity and kindness he shows during Eva’s illness. Delphine knows his resourcefulness and odd knowledge, much of it gathered in bars and from the battered dictionary that was the household’s only book until she grew old enough to acquire books of her own. She has cleaned up after him throughout her life, so his attentive conversation feels both welcome and dangerously persuasive. For a moment, his effort to distract and entertain her almost makes her believe he may yet be redeemed.

Delphine’s account of Roy after he learns who the Chavers family were exposes how much of his drinking is bound up with guilt and avoidance. He is distraught, rolling on the floor and repeatedly insisting that he had believed the family had gone to Arizona for the winter. Delphine remembers the scene in detail, but she recounts it subduedly: her father’s distress is real, yet it cannot undo what happened or settle what he has concealed. The story leaves her holding both his remorse and the unanswered questions surrounding it.

Care, Sobriety, and the Household

After Eva dies, Roy enters an unprecedented stretch of sobriety. The loss makes the haunting associated with the Chavers deaths unbearable, and he finds that the terror of withdrawal is preferable to seeing the dead again. Delphine’s expectation is that he will relapse once she leaves the shop, but instead he remains sober and becomes more considerate. Their changed routine has practical, domestic forms: Roy cooks breakfast, makes toast over the gas flame, and helps create a meal around a table polished by Delphine. The food and the regularity of breakfast sustain her through Eva’s death and its aftermath. Roy also sings songs he learned in the hobo jungle, bringing an unaccustomed lightness into the household.

The change does not make Delphine forget the past. When Roy later suffers the consequences of his earlier drinking, she is distressed by his shaking hands and unsteady, shuffling movement. She wonders why he has fallen into such serious trouble now that he is sober and behaving like a good man. Her pity is mixed with anger at herself for remembering him too generously, and with reluctance to see the physical damage alcohol has left behind. When he insists that he committed the act for which he is in trouble, Delphine tells him she will get a lawyer, while he answers that the witnesses have seen him and that he had to do it. Their exchange shows the difference between her instinct to protect him and his willingness to accept responsibility.

Relapse, Concealment, and Delphine’s Response

Roy’s later drinking becomes difficult for Delphine to detect because he manages his visits and behavior. He avoids his home, where the dead Chavers have appeared to him, and sometimes stays sober for two or three days each week. On those days he stays with Delphine, cooks substantial breakfasts, washes his own clothes, and scrubs floors. The homely industry is unlike the father she has known, and it helps keep the truth from her while she is away. She discovers the relapse only after returning from Chicago and looking for work. Delphine’s response is not just anger at Roy: she is dispirited by the realization that she ignored signs because, as she recognizes, she is less realistic about her father than about almost anything else.

The crisis becomes public when Delphine finds Roy in a state of severe intoxication, running through town unclothed and apparently unaware of his exposure. She gets him home, gives him water mixed with sugar and salt, secures him in a sheet because he resists being confined, and calls Doctor Heech. She then returns to the lumberyard, only to learn that the job she sought has been filled. The employer also asks that Roy not sleep among the lumber piles again, fearing he might start a fire. Delphine’s care therefore has immediate costs: she must manage the danger to her father, seek medical help, and reckon with how his condition affects her own ability to work.

Roy’s pattern of intermittent sobriety and renewed drinking also shapes what he tells her. He has long explained his drinking as an effort to fill an emptiness left by a lost love. Delphine once challenged him by insisting that everyone does things to fill emptiness. The remark comforts him by making his private desolation seem shared; during his sober period he even treats it as a directive to try other ways of living. Yet, as the narrative makes plain, those efforts do not hold. Alcohol remains the response he returns to, and the gap between his understanding of the problem and his ability to change it remains central to their relationship.

Confession, Death, and the Remaining Bond

As Roy grows gravely ill, he sleeps for long periods under Doctor Heech’s advice, eats little, and appears to Delphine to be preparing for death. She visits and tends him, aware that he may die while she is away. When she decides to ask about the secrets he owes her, Roy speaks of the Chavers deaths. He recalls sending young Ruthie Chavers into the cellar for ginger beer and liquor, giving him candles so he could read the French labels. Roy says he may have shut the hatch and remembers calling down to the boy to come back after he stopped singing over him during practice. He later returned to the cellar for liquor and found the family dead. Afterward, he says, he stayed drunk until Delphine and Cyprian arrived.

The confession reframes Roy’s long drinking as more than a personal failing: it is also bound to his effort to escape the knowledge of the deaths and the possibility that he contributed to them. It does not absolve him, and Delphine does not receive it as a clean explanation. His account comes late, when he is weak and nearing death; the uncertainty in his recollection remains part of what he leaves her. The relationship’s final intimacy is therefore inseparable from the painful truth he has withheld.

Roy dies at home while sitting upright, his attention fixed on pictures of Minnie that Delphine has placed nearby. The visiting nurse records his composed stare and tells Delphine of his death. Delphine is tired and furious at the waste of his life and of her affection, yet his death suddenly returns her to the desperate love she felt for him as a child. She cannot reduce what she feels to grief, fear of loneliness, exhaustion, or relief. Her response holds love and resentment together rather than resolving them.

At the cemetery, Delphine imagines Roy beside her for eternity, still telling rough jokes in her ear. The thought stands beside her awareness of a loneliness rooted in childhood loss and the absence of her mother. Roy’s place in her imagined afterlife does not erase his failures; it testifies to the stubborn continuity of their attachment. Their relationship ends not with a simple reconciliation, but with Delphine retaining both the cost of caring for him and the affection that survives his death.