Chapter 10 Summary

This chapter is devoted entirely to Norah. Reta recalls how her daughter had been accepted at McGill University in 1998. At the same time, Norah had met a young man and had fallen in love. Ben Abbot was a twenty-two-year-old philosophy student at the University of Toronto. Consequently, Norah changed her mind about attending McGill, enrolled at Toronto instead, and moved into an apartment off Bathurst with her boyfriend. Reta finds it strange to contemplate the presence of a stranger in Norah's life - a stranger who is intimately involved with her. She recognizes that she might simply be one of those women who experience problems coping with the sexual maturity of their daughters.

She recalls an incident the previous year, which had been Norah's second year at university. Norah was home in Orangetown for the weekend, and early one morning she was sitting...