Chapter 24 — 1978: Summary, Analysis, and Key Moments

⚠️ 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 {#summary}

Chapter 24 opens three years after June Riva's death, with Nina single-handedly keeping the family afloat on the restaurant's income. The chapter describes a period of relentless financial precarity: three Christmases without money for presents, birthdays marked by cakes recreated from memory because June never wrote down her recipes, and school years that Nina watched pass for her siblings while she herself never returned to the classroom.

When a customer at the restaurant asks Nina on a date, she freezes and declines, unable to explain that her life no longer has room for anything resembling normalcy or fun. The chapter makes clear that money is the central problem she cannot will into existence. She runs the car until it runs out of gas, postdates checks, opens credit cards she cannot pay, and turns off lights to save electricity. When Jay needs his wisdom teeth removed, Nina spends weeks negotiating dental insurance through the restaurant. When Hud fractures his wrist, he initially refuses to go to the hospital because he knows they cannot afford it, and Nina has to convince him to go anyway, then negotiates a bill she cannot actually pay.

Nina copes by making lemon roasted chicken when the family misses June, staying up late with Kit, and encouraging Jay and Hud to keep surfing even when household chores fall behind. Whenever Jay or Hud offers to drop out of school to work more shifts, Nina forbids them, threatening to kick them out of the house—a bluff they all recognize but respect.

In spring 1978, Nina and Kit watch from the bleachers as Hud and then Jay graduate. After graduation, Jay works at Riva's Seafood and a local surf shop, while Hud enrolls at Loyola Marymount with a financial aid package supplemented by side jobs and help from Nina. On weekends, the brothers ride up the coast chasing swells, with Hud photographing Jay to build both their portfolios.

Kit, nearing sixteen, grows increasingly independent. She spends time at Vanessa's house, attends parties, joins a club of girls who surf before school, and takes a job assisting a housepainter in Ventura. By the end of 1978, Nina sometimes comes home from twelve-hour shifts to an empty house. These quiet evenings unsettle her; she balances the checkbook, reviews Kit's report cards, and occasionally reads Jay and Hud's old comics to avoid thinking about her mother.

In February 1979, three and a half years after June's death, Nina sits alone on the rocks before dawn, watching a family of dolphins. She begins to weep—not from stress or frustration, but from grief. She misses her mother's perfume, her meatloaf, her presence, and mourns the weddings, meals, and sunsets June will never experience. She considers letting herself feel angry at her mother for the burnt dinners, the lit cigarettes, the drinking, and for getting into that bathtub in the first place, but she cannot quite reach that anger. She lets herself cry, watching the crabs and tide pools, and when she finishes, she feels somewhat renewed. She wipes her eyes, grabs her board, and paddles out to surf.

That April, a magazine editor on vacation spots Nina surfing at First Point. She is having an exceptional day in the water, and he approaches her as she comes ashore, telling her she should make money off her beauty and skill. He gives her a business card for a photographer working on a surf spread for Vivant magazine. Nina hesitates but calls the number, driven by the restaurant's red ink, an impending health inspection failure, Hud's rising tuition, Kit's cavities, and a leaking roof.

The photo shoot at Zuma is uncomfortable—the photographer and assistant insist on tiny bikinis, and Nina dislikes the leering eyes behind the camera. But when she sees the photos, something shifts. She sees herself as beautiful, carefree, and cool in a way she had not fully registered before. The June 1979 issue of Vivant features her face under the headline