60 pages • 2 hours read
Chandler BakerThe Husbands: A Novel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 23-29Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 23 Summary
The morning after therapy, Hayden tells Nora he washed Liv’s blue dress for school pictures. He saw it on the calendar and remembered, to Nora’s astonishment. Hayden plans to take Liv for new shoes after school and grab dinner so Nora can work. She wonders if he feels guilty for bringing up the accident. Alexis calls to invite her over, and Nora feels relief when she’s with the Dynasty Ranch wives. She asks if the HOA discriminates against stay-at-home moms, and they assure her there are several stay-at-home mothers in the development. Alexis tells Nora that Sylvia wasn’t a good fit, and she asks if Nora suspects Sylvia set the fire. Nora responds noncommittally, mentioning other leads, including the clicking noise that bothered Richard. Cornelia hasn’t heard this detail.
Nora recalls the “official version” of Liv’s accident: that Nora stepped away for one moment, then heard Liv fall. She rushed to Liv, like a good mother, and found her bleeding. Nora has learned to live with this story. She senses tension between Cornelia and Penny. Alexis tells Nora how lucky they feel to have her on their team, and the women chat, uninterrupted by Max or the kids. When they leave, Cornelia asks Nora not to contact the police with her new information until Cornelia speaks with Penny. When Nora moves toward Penny to touch base, Cornelia blocks her way. She invites Nora to a Mother’s Day celebration, saying that in Dynasty Ranch, Mother’s Day ranks above Christmas. Cornelia calls it a taste of what Nora’s life will look like once she moves in.
Chapter 24 Summary
Nora texts Andi, saying she has a prior engagement and will be late to the airport. She knows the Mother’s Day celebration isn’t truly a prior engagement, but the technicality strikes her as inconvenient. Nora and Hayden discuss the house; she knows he didn’t like the men, but he doesn’t recall this. When he says they should make an offer, Nora is surprised. He hugs her and says, “You deserve it […]. Really, Nora. You work so hard” (229).
At the office, Nora thinks about how nice Hayden is acting and wonders what is going on. She Googles the acronym Cornelia used to describe her therapy methods, P.A.C.T., but none of the articles mention the activities in which she and Hayden have participated. Unsettled, Nora remembers her premonitions. She’s had three in her life, all starting with a “general feeling of foreboding” (231). One preceded her brother’s near drowning. Another preceded her mother’s death during the only half hour Nora left her hospital room. The last preceded Liv’s accident. If she hadn’t “willfully ignored” her intuition, she thinks, she could have prevented the latter two as she did the first. She has the same sense now.
This chapter is followed by a link to a Mother’s Day shopping guide on social media. One female commenter describes just wanting some coffee while being forced to wait for breakfast in bed. A second anticipates another emailed gift card. A third praises her husband for his attention to Mother’s Day, though she wishes it would carry into the other 364 days a year. The lone man says women are “CRAZY” for Mother’s Day and need to calm down.
Chapter 25 Summary
When the Spanglers arrive at the Mother’s Day party, there are three husbands offering childcare. Nora and Hayden are wowed by the festivities. There are masseuses, stylists, and Sephora goodie bags, and the event is paid for by HOA dues. Alexis introduces Nora to Lucy and Ed, and Nora notes the fresh stitches in Ed’s scalp. Later, she sees Francine speaking to Penny, and Nora is sure Francine knows something about the fire. Thea joins them and brings Trevor, the young doctor from her office. Penny says Thea set her up with Trevor to keep her busy. Nora follows Francine outside, watching the teen talk to the same boy from before. Their body language is tense, and Francine storms off. Nora approaches him, correctly guessing that he is Devin, and she asks if there’s something he wants to tell her. He admits that he was with Francine at Alexis’s house on the night of the fire. Nora kicks herself, realizing that Francine was only trying to hide her boyfriend from her mother.
At the party, Roman toasts the mothers. Just then, Penny attacks Trevor with a fork, screaming that she wants Richard, not Trevor. Thea wraps her arms around Penny and whispers until Penny goes limp. Hayden joins Nora after calling the police, which makes Cornelia angry. The husbands tend to Trevor as Cornelia and Nora downplay the attack. Trevor doesn’t want to press charges, but the officer thinks it’s best to detain Penny. Cornelia promises to admit Penny to a psychiatric facility for 72 hours as an alternative to arrest.
Chapter 26 Summary
Nora completely misses Andi’s layover in Austin. When they talk, Andi is angry about how distant Nora’s become, and Nora accuses Andi of not understanding her life. Nora says she needs friends who live closer. Andi asks if these friends are more important than she is, and Nora says they might be. After the call, Nora returns a call from a local number though the caller didn’t leave a message. A young woman answers, and Nora identifies herself, but the woman says the call was a wrong number. Later, Nora gets another call from the same number but ignores it. She visits Penny in the hospital, finding her unresponsive. Nora calls for a nurse, and suddenly, Penny snatches her hand and says Richard was killed. When the nurse arrives, Penny’s face goes blank. Nora returns to her office. Dave, the firefighter, calls to tell her that the fire was a freak accident. He sends his report, and she reads the list of substances he found there: “lint, dust, dirt, Lestoil, carpet threads, [and] candle wax” among them (259).
Chapter 27 Summary
When Nora arrives at their next appointment, Hayden’s already in Cornelia’s office. Nora prepares to go in, but Cornelia stops her. She says Penny doesn’t want to pursue the case, because it’s bad for her mental health, and that Penny and Richard struggled before his death, and Richard became violent. A few weeks before the fire, Penny told Cornelia she “lost control” of him. If an investigation finds that Richard started the fire, Penny won’t get any insurance money. Cornelia praises Nora and Hayden’s progress, and Nora notes how much easier her life is since they started therapy. Cornelia explains that she has a sympathetic friend on the board of Liv’s preschool, and she hands Nora a letter of reenrollment. Nora is speechless with gratitude. Thea emerges from the office and says they can go in.
This chapter is followed by a link to and summary of an article on social media. The article discusses the way the work of motherhood is often forgotten or minimized, leading to negative consequences for mothers. Female commenters confirm this.
Chapter 28 Summary
At this point, Nora thinks she’d do anything Cornelia asks. She sees Hayden wearing Thea’s brain-machine interface, and he claims to be comfortable. Cornelia brings up the accident, and Nora explains: Liv was 16 months old, and Nora was exhausted. Liv wasn’t sleeping through the night, so Nora couldn’t either, having lost her ability to sleep deeply after Liv was born. Hayden’s sleep, however, was deep and uninterrupted. When Liv got sick, Hayden promised he’d handle a night, but then he remembered a big meeting the next morning. He was supposed to rush home, but by midafternoon, Nora was a zombie. She put Liv in the playroom with a movie and went to lay down. She had a glass of wine but couldn’t relax, so she took an Ambien. Nora checked on Liv, then finally fell asleep. She woke hours later to the sound of Hayden arriving home, but Liv wasn’t in the playroom. That’s when Nora saw the open baby gate at the top of the steps and found Liv injured. She was too afraid to tell anyone the truth. Cornelia turns to Hayden and asks, in a new tone, what “we” say when someone is hurt. Hayden says he is sorry, and he assures Nora he isn’t mad. He says, “I should help you more. You work so hard” (274). Nora is confused, and Cornelia says that’s normal after such a breakthrough.
Chapter 29 Summary
Back at home, Hayden prepares dinner, calling their session “healthy.” Gary calls because he lost an important document, and he’s hoping Nora can help him retrieve and finish it. Nora checks with Hayden, and he tells her it’s no problem, that it’s a big year for her. She spends the next two hours helping Gary, who compliments her good work. By the time she’s finished, Liv’s asleep, and Nora decides to put on some sexy underwear, feeling aroused by this “new and improved” version of her husband (280).
Chapters 23-29 Analysis
The Dynasty Ranch wives offer Nora a level of support and recognition she gets nowhere else, and this departure from her usual guilt and feelings of inadequacy explains her unwillingness to find fault with them. When she spends the afternoon with these women, she “sens[es] an undercurrent [of tension between Penny and Cornelia]” (224). It’s a red flag that not everything is at it seems, but then Alexis says how lucky they are to have Nora on their team. Nora doesn’t usually hear appreciation like this: Gary tells her she needs to be more available, and Hayden gets mad when she makes him feel like a bad partner. Therefore, even when Cornelia blocks her from talking to Penny, Nora isn’t alarmed. The fabulous Mother’s Day celebration and Cornelia’s help in getting Liv into school persuade Nora to accept Cornelia’s explanation for Penny’s attack on Trevor. To maintain the “smoothness” she’s experienced since beginning couples’ therapy, Nora knows she “will do anything that Cornelia asks her to do” (267). The promise of friendship from this group of women is tantalizing, compared with The Persistence of Marriage Inequality and Society’s Gender-Based Double Standards that characterize other aspects of Nora’s life. When Hayden apologizes to Nora for Liv’s accident, Nora ignores her confusion because Cornelia tells her it’s proof of Hayden’s progress in therapy. Even when Hayden says the phrase Nora’s heard so often from the Dynasty husbands—“You work so hard” (274)—she wonders if he’s having an affair rather than suspecting her new, supportive friends of wrongdoing.
It is likely that this desperation for acceptance contributed to Nora ignoring her second and third premonitions. Her first premonition occurred when she was a child, when she saved her brother from drowning by listening to her instincts. However, the desire to be a dutiful daughter and to be seen as a capable mother—a wish that prevented her from demanding Hayden’s help—kept her from listening to her instincts in the latter cases. Her need for rest was present in both cases as well. She left her mother’s hospital room for only one half-hour period, having “finally relented and gone out for coffee” (231). Later, if she hadn’t been so worn out from working full time and staying up all night with Liv, she might have regarded her intuition more closely. Society’s Gender-Based Double Standards, which assign a woman value based on her ability and willingness to care for others, ironically, overwhelmed Nora and kept her from doing this. If men were valued according to the same standards, then Tom and Hayden would have felt just as responsible for their family members’ health and would have shared the caretaking instead of allowing it all to fall to Nora.
Her desperation for support is so crushing that it persuades Nora to lie to Andi, perhaps ruining her oldest friendship. She tells Andi she has a “prior engagement,” though she made Mother’s Day plans after committing to meet Andi at the airport. When Nora does apologize, Andi questions her sincerity. Nora didn’t tell Hayden about meeting Andi because she didn’t want him to try to talk her out of going to the party. Now she justifies her actions by telling herself it was “her Mother’s Day” (251), implying that she ought to get to do what she wants. Nora wants a friend who will keep her spare key, who doesn’t have to be asked to hold her baby while she eats, who “will go for a walk with her if she fucks up at work, who will remember what it felt like to have stitches in her vagina […]. And, in return, she will do the same” (252). She needs support—especially because she doesn’t get it at home or work—and this compels her to tell the truth: that this support is more valuable than her long-time, long-distance friendship with Andi.
