Puerto Vallarta enters the novel through Brett Bohlinger’s memory of a trip with her mother, Elizabeth Bohlinger, nearly thirteen years before the present action. The Mexican port town holds two sharply different versions of a holiday: the resort’s carefully arranged comforts and the improvised evening Brett and her mother find beyond them. Remembered while Brett is weighing her own choices, the trip offers evidence that rejecting a supposedly perfect experience need not mean failing to appreciate it.

The resort and the unease of paradise

Elizabeth took Brett to Puerto Vallarta to celebrate Brett’s graduation from Northwestern. It was the first all-inclusive resort either of them had visited. At the Grand Palladium Vallarta, a full-service spa, three infinity pools, gourmet meals, and umbrella drinks made the place seem almost heavenly. Yet by the third day, Brett was desperate to get away. She felt guilty for not loving a holiday that must have cost her mother a fortune, and imagined Elizabeth would be devastated to know she had raised an ungrateful daughter.

The resort’s abundance is part of the problem: attentive service keeps offering another drink, a dry towel, or a spritz of cool water. When the pool attendant asks for the tenth time, Elizabeth declines. She then tells the attendant, with graciousness, that she is going loco in paradise. Brett cannot tell whether her mother genuinely feels confined or is saying it for Brett’s sake; either way, the remark releases them from the pressure to enjoy the resort as they are expected to.

The escape into old town

Brett and Elizabeth run to their room, laughing, change into sundresses and sandals, and take a rickety old bus to Viejo Vallarta. At the mercado they haggle with local vendors, then find a local bar where a mariachi band plays on a dusty wooden platform. The musicians wear silver-studded suits and sombreros; mother and daughter drink cerveza and join the band and other patrons in calling out between songs. Brett remembers this as the best night of the trip—not because it offers more luxury, but because they have stepped away from the resort’s managed pleasures and found an experience together.

The memory’s later significance

Years later, Catherine Humphries-Bohlinger praises a resort she has visited and recommends that Brett and Herbert Moyer go there. Her enthusiasm prompts Brett to recall Puerto Vallarta and briefly judge herself for considering a breakup with Herbert: if a normal person could love him, perhaps she is wrong to leave. The memory complicates that self-reproach. Brett and Elizabeth had also been offered what looked like an ideal holiday, yet both found their own way out of it and shared their happiest evening elsewhere.

As Herbert arrives, Brett is holding Austin Elizabeth and feels grateful for the memory. Its significance lies in the distinction it lets her make: comfort and abundance do not guarantee contentment, and discomfort with constant pampering is not necessarily ingratitude. Puerto Vallarta becomes less a judgment on the destination than a touchstone for recognizing that people can experience the same apparent paradise differently.