Chapter 16: 1969 — Summary, Themes, and Key Takeaways
⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This guide contains detailed spoilers for the entire novel. Proceed only if you've finished reading or are comfortable knowing the plot.
Summary
The chapter opens in 1969, a year when the counterculture has settled into rustic Malibu and the beaches are crowded with surfers riding new, aerodynamic shortboards. Mick Riva's career has exploded—a hit album, a sold-out world tour, screaming fans, and constant radio play—yet for his four children, Nina, Jay, Hud, and little Kit, he exists only as a distant presence: a voice on a grocery store loudspeaker, a face on an album cover, a billboard on a road trip. They rarely think of him as their father at all.
June, meanwhile, is struggling. After her second divorce from Mick, he paid off the house but never resumed the child support and alimony payments he owed. June checks the mailbox daily, but the checks never come. She suspects it is an oversight, yet she cannot bring herself to call Mick and ask for what is owed—she refuses to let him see her need. Instead, she turns to her parents and takes a job at Pacific Fish, the restaurant her father ran before his death two years earlier. Now she works alongside her mother, Christina, in the exact place she had hoped Mick would save her from.
One sweltering July morning, the restaurant is overwhelmed with customers seeking cold drinks and shrimp rolls. June, in crisis mode, puts the busboys in the kitchen and hands Nina a rag, asking her to clean tables. Nina works fast, with a sense of duty and pride, and June—watching her daughter scrub down a table—sees herself twenty years younger and feels she might jump out of her skin. She sends Nina to take her siblings to the beach.
The four children cross the Pacific Coast Highway and charge into the ocean, which has always been their home. They bodysurf and play until Jay spots a lone surfboard—pale yellow with a cherry red stringer, beat up across the deck—resting against the grassy dunes. Despite Nina's protests that it isn't theirs, Jay drags it into the water and tries to ride it. He falls repeatedly. Nina, anxious about his safety, finally realizes that things are going to happen whether she relaxes or not, and she takes the board herself. Lying across it, she paddles out, catches a wave, and rides it all the way in, feeling weightless and free.
The children spend the afternoon taking turns on the board, crashing and gliding in equal measure. Jay eventually stands up and rides a wave successfully, beaming with pure joy. When June sneaks out of the restaurant to check on them, she teases them about the board and tells them they can keep it if it is still there tomorrow.
That night, the children talk about nothing but the water. June listens patiently, adoring her children and thinking of them like magic grow capsules that slowly reveal what they were always destined to become. Later, Nina, unable to sleep, finds her mother in the living room sipping vodka from the bottle. Nina asks if she can get a job at the restaurant to buy surfboards for all of them. June promises instead: