Roy Watzka's sobriety

Roy Watzka’s sobriety is a profound change in his life and in his relationship with Delphine. It begins in the aftermath of Eva’s death, when the memory of the Chavers family’s deaths becomes unbearable and drinking no longer offers escape. Abstinence brings practical care and a steadier household, but it also makes Roy unfamiliar to his daughter: the old, predictable pattern between them gives way to a quieter life neither knows how to name while living it.

The Turning Point

After Eva dies, Roy enters an unprecedented period of sobriety. Dry days become weeks, and the narrative connects his ability to remain sober both to the starkness of her death and to the horror returning from the cellar. Since the Chavers family’s bodies were discovered, Roy has been haunted during bouts of delirium by visions of the dead. Eva’s death makes that experience unbearable; for the first time, he finds a horror in his thoughts worse than withdrawal. Sobriety therefore begins not as an announced reform but as a response to grief and fear.

Work at Home

Roy redirects his energy toward his own house instead of relying on other people to use his wasted strength. When Cyprian returns from a trip north, he finds Roy painting the house sunny yellow, with the blue of its doors and windows restored. Roy sands and varnishes the floors, fills the cellar more thoroughly, and blacks the stove. These repairs give visible form to his change: the place associated with the cellar’s terrible history becomes a home he is actively putting in order.

Roy also begins caring for Delphine and the boys while Delphine has her hands full after Eva’s death. Some mornings he makes breakfast: oatmeal with butter, brown sugar, and cream, or eggs and toast prepared over the gas stove. Delphine’s purchase of that stove on timed payments and the food set out on a polished table make his help part of a wider effort to sustain the household. The jelly in her mother’s small cut-glass bowl, which Delphine had thought long gone, is among the details that make these breakfasts feel like an unexpected compensation for what the family has endured.

Sobriety and Delphine

Roy’s continued abstinence surprises Delphine, who expects him to relapse when she finally leaves the shop. Instead, his good behavior lasts. He sings songs he learned in the hobo jungle, including “Blue Tail Fly,” “Joe Hill,” and “Big Rock Candy Mountain.” The house’s chickens and the porch steps nailed back into place extend his domestic work beyond repairs and meals: his sobriety becomes a pattern of small, repeatable acts of upkeep.

The change does not immediately make father and daughter intimate. Delphine is troubled by Roy’s continued sobriety because it leaves her facing a father she does not know how to approach. Their old relationship had been familiar in its difficulty: he would come to her asking for money, and she would refuse. Sober, he sometimes tells her elaborate stories about his supposed past, including claims that he performed in an Italian opera, killed a bear, learned to weave from a Navajo, and could recite long prayers in Hebrew. Delphine recognizes the stories as the kind he once told Eva, but they do not resolve her question about who Roy is without alcohol.

A Quieter Life

Roy remains part of the men’s social world. After hours, he comes to the shop to sit with the singing-club members and slice Fidelis’s sausage onto square crackers; Cyprian joins them, and the men drive Delphine home after she finishes in the kitchen. For Delphine, these ordinary routines acquire meaning in retrospect. They make up an even life without the old starts and stalls, a happiness she did not recognize as happiness while it was happening.

Roy’s sobriety is thus neither a simple return to the father Delphine remembers nor a complete answer to the past. It is a sustained change made legible through work, food, song, and shared routine. The cellar’s haunting remains part of its cause, while the restored house and regular evenings show what his abstinence makes possible: a steadier household, and a relationship with Delphine that must be encountered anew.