Delphine Watzka and Roy Watzka

Delphine Watzka and Roy Watzka share a father–daughter bond formed by early loss and prolonged dependence: Delphine loses her mother as an infant, grows up attached to Roy despite his alcoholism, and repeatedly becomes the person who keeps him alive and manages the consequences of his drinking. Her return to their neglected farmhouse, where she finds an unbearable accumulation of filth and later learns that bodies are in the cellar, makes the cost of that attachment unmistakable. The relationship persists through anger, shame, fear, and tenderness; it is a central source of Delphine’s habits of care, but also a burden she cannot simply put down.

Identity and Early Bond

Delphine is only three or four months old when her mother dies. Roy remains her sole parent, but his affection and need do not translate into reliable care. Their household depends on a small monthly income from land that Roy leases; it is often spent on alcohol unless Delphine manages to take some of it away. She loves her father intensely, even though his self-pity and drinking make that love painful and sometimes misplaced.

The relationship becomes a pattern in which Roy’s vulnerability calls Delphine into action. She learns to anticipate his needs and the damage alcohol can bring, while Roy depends on her efforts without consistently changing his behavior. The arrangement is not presented as a simple exchange of affection: Delphine is attached to him, but his dependence narrows her choices and places adult responsibilities on her while she is still young.

Childhood: Work, Anger, and Responsibility

Delphine leaves school and works a succession of poorly paid jobs while Roy continues drinking. She wraps butter, cracks eggs, sorts cookies, works a buttonholer, launders sheets, and sorts bricks. Her wages are vulnerable to his demands: he takes money to drink elsewhere, or brings drinking companions home, where they consume the food and invade the only private space she has.

One night, after the men have entered her bedroom and refuse to leave, Delphine takes an axe from the woodpile and uses it to split a playing card on the table. The gesture frightens Roy and sends him and his companions out of the house. Roy subsequently falls through thin ice, contracts pneumonia, and nearly dies; Delphine leaves the brickworks to nurse him. It is the first time she openly turns against him, yet the consequence is another period of care. Her anger can interrupt his authority, but it does not free her from the work of keeping him alive.

Even when she considers destroying the farmhouse, she cannot bring herself to burn it. It is the house where she grew up and, according to one version of Roy’s account, where her mother gave birth to her. The place therefore holds both the harm of Roy’s neglect and Delphine’s few remaining connections to her mother. Her attachment to the house and to Roy is entangled with a history she cannot neatly separate into what should be kept and what should be abandoned.

Leaving, Returning, and Finding the House

Delphine eventually leaves North Dakota with Cyprian, hoping for excitement and a livelihood on the road. Yet her bond with Roy remains active at a distance. She fears that returning may be a mistake, and worries that Roy might draw Cyprian into drinking. Still, she misses her father and imagines him dying or drowning himself. The prospect of his death becomes a force pulling her back toward Argus, even though she knows that his needs have repeatedly made her life harder.

When Delphine and Cyprian arrive at the farmhouse, Roy comes out to meet them, weeping in a manner that horrifies Cyprian. Delphine goes inside and finds a house overwhelmed by accumulated waste: spoiled food, clothing, bodily refuse, animal remains, insect husks, rat droppings, and rotting potatoes. She believes Roy has allowed the mess to become a demonstration of how helpless he is without her. The scene turns her usual, controlled kindness into grief; she asks for a shovel and breaks down in front of Cyprian and Roy.

The house’s condition does not erase Delphine’s anger, but it exposes the extent of Roy’s incapacity and the emotional cost of returning. She and Cyprian begin clearing the farmhouse rather than abandoning it. Even the cellar becomes part of the family’s burden: after finding bodies there, Delphine tells Roy directly that dead people are in his cellar. Roy’s first response is to plead for alcohol, and the discovery of the remains of Doris, Porky, and their child deepens the crisis. His drinking and disordered household have consequences extending beyond the two of them.

Care as a Recurring Practice

Delphine’s caretaking continues in concrete routines rather than declarations. Her history with Roy helps explain why she is quick to take responsibility for people who cannot manage themselves, though the novel does not reduce every later relationship to a repetition of her childhood. She organizes the road show’s practical life, and when Roy’s needs bring her back to Argus she faces the work of restoring the farmhouse and supporting him again.

Her care is also visible in the disciplined routines she maintains elsewhere. At the meat shop, she closes the store, cleans the floor, applies wax in careful passes, and plans to return before opening to finish the work. Such attention to order contrasts with the chaos at Roy’s house. It suggests a form of control Delphine can exercise through labor, while the home she shares with her father remains a place where effort cannot guarantee that disorder will not return.

Later, Delphine takes responsibility for Markus’s daily needs and teaches him practical habits associated with survival. She establishes a morning routine with lemonade, and within a week he is dry in the morning. The episode shows her capacity to turn observation into patient, structured care. Her caregiving is not confined to Roy, but the father–daughter relationship is the early, formative setting in which care becomes both a skill and an obligation.

Loss, Memory, and the Limits of Care

Roy’s drinking also shapes Delphine’s experience of her mother’s absence. As he becomes increasingly defined by alcohol, Delphine knows her mother chiefly through photographs, where she appears youthful and mysterious. Roy will not explain how her mother died. Delphine therefore invents possibilities from ordinary objects and keeps a white stone in a wooden box, using it as a private comfort until she is twelve.

As an adult, after the farmhouse’s filth has forced her to confront the past again, Delphine remembers the photographs in the black lacquer bureau and feels the old wish to see her mother’s face clearly. The memory links her return to Roy with a longing that Roy cannot satisfy: the father who remains alive is also the keeper of the traces of the mother who is gone. Delphine’s attachment to him is thus bound not only to his dependence but to the unresolved family history contained in the house.

The relationship remains contradictory rather than resolved. Delphine can be furious with Roy, recognize that his helplessness has become another demand upon her, and still miss him enough to return. Her care does not cure his alcoholism, nor does it turn the harm he causes into harmlessness. Instead, the bond shows how affection and responsibility can persist without making dependence fair or recovery certain. Roy’s needs repeatedly interrupt Delphine’s attempts to build a life elsewhere; her return, and the labor it requires, makes that cost visible.