Part 1, Waiting Summary

Dolores sits at her bedroom window and says the Lord's Prayer slowly, watching for her father to come home. If she sees him before she says the prayer three times, she is supposed to run downstairs and warn her mother, who is chatting with a friend and drinking a little too much. Dolores lives in a cramped rental house with her four sisters and her parents. She shares a bedroom with her mother and two of her sisters. Another bedroom houses two of her older sisters. One sister is no longer living with them, and the last bedroom is called the Box Room. That is where her father sleeps. There is a chest in Dolores' room where her mother used to put her to sleep with the lid down so that her father could not find her. He might have smothered...