Lennie Walker and Bailey Walker’s sisterhood

Lennie Walker and Bailey Walker’s sisterhood is the emotional measure of the novel’s loss: Bailey’s death ends their daily life together, but not Lennie’s relationship with her. Its shape changes from shared routines and unspoken familiarity into unanswered questions, guilt, memory, and deliberate acts of remembrance. Lennie’s grief is not a movement away from Bailey so much as a struggle to live with a bond that can no longer be answered in the ordinary ways.

A closeness formed around absence

The sisters’ intimacy develops in a family already marked by absence. Their mother has been gone for years, and Bailey pressed Gram repeatedly for answers about her. A drawing Bailey made at about eleven, depicting their mother as an explorer, becomes an artifact of that questioning. The family explanation of a Walker “restless gene” gives Lennie a story for their mother’s departure, but also makes the sisters’ shared experience of being left behind part of their closeness.

Their bond is expressed through familiarity with one another’s ordinary lives: Lennie remembers waiting for Bailey to come home so they could eat Gram’s chicken fricassee, impatiently doing chemistry in the room they shared. The memory becomes unbearable after Lennie realizes that, at the very moment she was thinking about dinner and schoolwork, Bailey had taken her last breath elsewhere. The ordinary detail sharpens the rupture: their shared life had continued in Lennie’s assumptions even as it was ending beyond her knowledge.

That closeness did not mean that everything was said. At Bailey’s desk, Lennie sees the plastic Saint Anthony beside the old drawing of their mother and wonders why Bailey had placed it there. The discovery leads her to question whether the sisters had really told each other everything. Bailey’s marriage, and the news Lennie believes she and Toby were waiting to announce about a baby, remain beyond the reach of any conversation between them. The unanswered questions complicate Lennie’s memories of intimacy without erasing the love within them.

Death and the broken pattern of daily life

After Bailey dies, Lennie returns to the place where she had been doing chemistry when the phone brought the news. She remembers the room, the meal waiting downstairs, and her desire for Bailey to hurry home. This physical return makes the difference between the sisters’ former routine and Lennie’s new reality impossible to soften: the person whose arrival once organized the evening will not come back through the door.

The loss also unsettles Lennie’s sense of who she is. Lying alone, she catches herself kissing the air and her pillow, then recoils at the fact that she has become entangled with Toby, Bailey’s boyfriend. She remembers having promised Bailey that she would never kiss him again. For Lennie, this is not simply a confused new desire; it is bound up with the sister she has lost, and with the fear that grief has carried her across a boundary she and Bailey had shared. The promise remains meaningful even when Lennie breaks it.

Her mourning repeatedly turns toward the life the sisters will not have. Lennie imagines Bailey’s child growing up, and the future scenes she will miss: holding the baby, teaching the child clarinet, and growing older alongside Bailey. The imagined family future makes the death extend beyond the day it happened. Lennie is grieving not only their past and present, but also the years of sisterhood that can no longer occur.

A voice that remains, and grief that changes her

When Lennie discovers that Bailey’s phone account has not yet been canceled, she calls her sister’s number. Bailey’s outgoing message still has her voice in it, introducing herself as Juliet for the month and addressing callers in playful, theatrical language. Lennie calls repeatedly, initially hanging up at the tone; eventually, on one call, she stays on the line long enough to speak. The message cannot answer her, but its surviving sound gives her a way to approach Bailey directly when ordinary conversation is no longer possible.

Lennie’s bond with Bailey also shapes how she understands her own transformation. Lying on the forest floor, she contrasts the mild, protected happiness she imagines she might have had if Bailey were alive with the exposed intensity of her present life. She wonders whether she has become a shell-less version of herself, more willing to feel and to play music, and is ashamed that anything good might emerge from Bailey’s death. She recalls Bailey urging her to come out of her shell and concludes that it is Bailey’s life, rather than her death, that teaches her how to be. The thought does not make the loss worthwhile; it lets Lennie receive her sister’s influence without confusing that influence with a justification for the loss.

Sharing Bailey beyond the family

For a time, Lennie treats grief as if it were a private claim shared chiefly with Toby. She later recognizes that this narrowed her attention: Gram and Big were also grieving, and Lennie had mistaken Gram’s repeated invitations to talk or share tea as care directed only toward herself. Her understanding of the family’s loss broadens, but Bailey remains at its center—not as something Lennie owns, but as someone whose absence everyone must face differently.

Lennie gradually lets the people still in her life know more of the sister who shaped her. She writes poems and wants Joe to read them, because she wants him to know Bailey as well as the person Lennie has become after her death. When he does read the poems, Lennie is glad that he can know her sister through them. The act makes writing a form of introduction: Bailey, who cannot meet Joe, becomes part of the intimacy Lennie is building with him.

At Bailey’s grave, Lennie places a notebook containing transcriptions of Gram’s letters to their mother inside the small cabinet in the gravestone. She wants Bailey to have those words and to remain part of the family story. In the same cabinet she finds an orange-topaz ring, which she believes Toby had made for Bailey. Lennie imagines it as part of the announcement Bailey never got to make, then kisses the ring and returns it beside the notebook. The two objects hold different kinds of unfinished connection: the letters speak to the family’s long separation from their mother, while the ring evokes the future Lennie believes Bailey and Toby meant to share.

The bond carried into the future

Lennie’s first visit to Bailey’s grave gathers memory and continuing attachment into a physical act. She runs through the woods before reaching the hilltop cemetery, then rests against the warm gravestone, touches Bailey’s name, and reads the words she had written for the funeral. She tells Bailey that she misses her and cannot bear that Bailey will miss so much. The address acknowledges both the intimacy that persists and the irreparable fact that Bailey cannot participate in Lennie’s future.

That future becomes especially stark when Lennie recognizes that she has one and Bailey does not. She understands that Bailey’s death will return throughout her life, because her grief will return with her love. This is not a resolution in which sisterhood is replaced or forgotten. Rather, Lennie begins to imagine living with Bailey’s absence as part of the relationship itself: she can miss her sister, carry her into poems and family memory, and still move toward a life Bailey will not see. The enduring bond gives the novel’s grief its double force—Bailey is gone, and she remains consequential in how Lennie remembers, speaks, and lives.