Summary

Chapter 12 opens with a description of Hyacinth’s feelings about Avril leaving Bird Hill to move to Brooklyn and how she always thought her daughter would come home someday. She could never understand how people can live on top of each other in cities like that and still be so isolated when the life she has come to know in Bird Hill is the exact opposite. She also remembers how Avril was not always so distant from her, and at one time she had been the light of her life and a devoted family member, but once she left for New York she only received the constructed version of her daughter’s life that she chose to give her, and so the only authentic version of her Hyacinth had to hold on to was in her memories.

One day the money that...