56 pages • 1 hour read
Naima CosterWhat's Mine and Yours
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “October 1992”
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains depictions of racism and substance use disorder and mentions teen pregnancy and abortion.
Ray Gilbert runs a coffee shop, Superfine, with his business partner, Linette, in the Piedmont in North Carolina. Today a reporter is coming by Superfine to take pictures for a story about the recent influx of new businesses on Beard Street. Ray comes in early to make a new donut recipe he designed just for this day. With him is his girlfriend Jade’s six-year-old son, Gee. Ray and Jade met when Gee was still an infant. Ray has been the only father Gee knows. Linette arrives and questions Ray about Jade’s role in Gee’s life, clearly disapproving.
Superfine opens to steady business. Jade arrives, hungover and angry. Jade became pregnant while still in high school, and she harbors resentments about the life she lost. For this reason, despite being in nursing school, she often goes out drinking. Ray supports her, aware of how her troubled childhood has scarred her. He calms her, allows her to take Gee to school, and asks her to call later to let him know how she did on an upcoming test.
At lunchtime, Ray steps out to have a cigarette with local mechanic Robbie Ventura. They met one night when Ray had car trouble and Ventura helped him push it to the garage. Robbie has bought a house out in the north part of the county and encourages Ray to do the same, claiming it is an investment in their children’s futures. Ray thinks it’s a good idea.
Ray calls Jade and learns that she still has a headache, so he agrees to pick up Gee from school and meet her at her cousin Wilson’s house. Linette catches Ray as he’s leaving and tells him the reporter is finally coming, but Ray decides to go anyway to keep Jade from having to go out. As Ray pulls up to Wilson’s house, he sees a stranger speaking to Jade and Wilson. Sensing trouble, Ray leaves Gee in the car and approaches, overhearing the man threatening Jade over some money Wilson owes the man. Ray comes up and puts himself between the man and Jade. The man pulls out a gun. Ray pushes Jade further behind him. The man shoots Ray. Gee sees the shooting and runs to Ray, calling, “[D]addy.”
Chapter 2 Summary: “November 1996”
Lacey May Ventura is gripped with fear when the weather turns cold, and she realizes the oil tank is down to 15%. Unable to afford to buy more, she goes into the house and reduces the temperature on the thermostat, worrying about how her family will get through the rest of the winter. When Lacey May’s three daughters—Noelle, Margarita, and Diane—come home, Lacey May makes a game of it, telling them it is “winter in [their] house!” (20). Lacey May’s husband, Robbie, is in prison for stealing a police car while high. Lacey May has no job experience and cannot find work. She sent the last of their money to Robbie so he could call home, which he hasn’t done.
Lacey May gathers the last of her change and goes to the grocery store where her high school friend, Hank, works. She asks Hank for a job. Instead, he offers to move her and her children into his home, implying that Lacey May would have to share his bed. Lacey May refuses. Lacey May tries again to make a party of the cold house, but the children refuse to play along. Lacey May sends them to their own beds where they struggle to sleep. The next morning, Diane is sick. Lacey May sends the children to school anyway. Lacey May goes to the neighbor, Ruth Green, and offers to do some yard work in exchange for a tank of oil, but Ruth refuses. When Lacey May returns home, she gets a call from the school to come get Diane. When she arrives, the principal tells Lacey May that Margarita told her teacher about the conditions at home. The principal says that if things don’t change by Monday, they will have to call social services. Lacey May takes all three girls home, puts them to bed, and tells them a story. When they are asleep, she calls Hank and accepts his deal.
Chapter 3 Summary: “September 2018”
Noelle lives in Atlanta with her photographer husband, Nelson, in an exclusive neighborhood. Nelson is currently in Paris on a business trip and not answering Noelle’s calls. Noelle is struggling with a party invitation she knows she cannot ignore; it is a party thrown by the homeowner’s association presidents, the Suttons, and she does not enjoy their parties. Noelle decides to ask her college friend, Inéz, to go to the party with her. Inéz is critical of Noelle’s exclusive community because it is distant and has isolated her. Inéz is also critical of Noelle’s desire to become a mother, feeling that Noelle has given up on her aspirations.
At the Suttons, Noelle and Inéz are told a story about a woman who recently moved in and was asked to leave the community pool by a neighbor who was not aware they were residents of the area. Noelle simply listens, but Inéz becomes enraged because she assumes the man’s motivations were racial: “I assume that what got left out of the story is what’s obvious. That Patricia and her son are black” (46). She pointedly states that she hopes Patricia and her son are made to feel safe and welcome in the neighborhood, but her concerns are dismissed. Back at the house, Inéz accuses Noelle of losing her passion and having become too reliant on Nelson. Noelle confesses that she lost a pregnancy, which she had not told anyone about.
Noelle receives a phone call from her sister, Diane, telling her that their mother, Lacey May, is in the hospital. Lacey May has cancer, a brain tumor. Noelle is indifferent, as her relationship with her mother is strained. Diane insists she come home, suggesting Lacey May’s cancer is fatal. Noelle reluctantly agrees.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
Illustrating the theme of Shared Tragedy, the novel begins with the murder of Ray Gilbert. Ray is a kind, gentle man who has taken on the responsibility of a child and girlfriend at a young age. His determination and ambition—as seen through the success of Superfine—do not contradict his loving and supportive nature; he cares for Jade and Gee, putting them ahead of his career and ultimately even giving his life to protect Jade. This is the tragedy that will follow each and every character in this novel for the 30 years that the plot spans. Ray’s murder has an immediate, obvious impact on Jade and Gee, but the connection to Robbie and his family—shown only briefly in their first conversation—is not clear until the second chapter. Lacey May doesn’t know who Ray is, but she recognizes that Ray’s murder had an impact on Robbie that she can’t fully appreciate. By Chapter 2, four years after Ray’s murder, Robbie has gone from buying a home and eagerly planning a great future for his daughters to a man in prison, dependent on drugs, and unable—or unwilling—to keep in contact with his beloved family. Thus, Ray’s death has a widespread influence, tying together all those affected by his loss.
The novel is told in a shifting timeline, and the reader is not given all the information necessary to attach story lines until the end of the novel. In this collection of chapters, the reader meets Gee as a six-year-old boy in 1992, and four years later, Noelle at age 10. Noelle is then introduced as an adult in 2018, married to a photographer named Nelson and estranged from her mother Lacey May. These chapters introduce enough information to connect relationships and make the connection to Ray’s murder, but they do not explain Noelle’s estrangement from her mother or how Gee and Jade might tie in with her adult life.
Chapter 2 introduces Lacey May. At first, Lacey May is a highly sympathetic character. She is somewhat naive and highly dependent on her husband; she knows little about her home, and she has few ways of taking care of herself and her family. Though Robbie has gone to prison and left her without an income, she remains devoted to him, believing that “the trouble in Robbie’s brain […] was why he needed the drugs, why he would disappear and get up to no good. It wasn’t that he had stopped loving her or the girls” (24). Other characters criticize Lacey May for her naivete and her inability to care for her children on her own, accusing her of “playing dumb” and claiming she doesn’t put her children first. Lacey May is the first example of the theme of Strong Women Fighting for Their Futures; with no other options, she agrees to move into Hank’s house, essentially promising him her body in exchange for a warm home for her daughters. Though this is not a choice she would willingly make under any other circumstances, Lacey May shows she will do whatever it takes to protect her children.
Robbie’s addiction is touched on in this chapter, but not fully explored. Lacey May views the world with a certain level of naivety that has her clinging to the idea that Robbie has a chemical imbalance in his brain, which is why he has done what he’s done—theft, drugs, and the like. It is important to Lacey May that Robbie still loves her, a theme that will run through her story until the end despite the choices his actions force her to make.
Chapter 3 continues the theme of Strong Women with adult Noelle, who has recently suffered a tragedy of her own: the loss of a pregnancy. Noelle also introduces the theme of The Struggle to Understand One’s Identity. Her friend, Inéz, accuses Noelle of becoming lost in her husband and her desire to be a mother. Noelle is not outraged by a story of racism in her community, something Inéz clearly believes Noelle would have found unacceptable at another time in her life. Noelle remembers a time when she’d defended Inéz from her mother’s thoughtless comments about her skin tone, and then proceeded to reflect on her own biases—but in the present day, Noelle puts Inéz’s opinion down to their once-shared idea of feminism. In general, 2018 Noelle seems to drift through life: safe, but lacking any passion or dedication. Though she was once excited about her exclusive community, now, she clearly has no true love for it—yet she tries to fit in anyway, attending the Suttons’ party out of obligation and keeping her head down. She can’t get in touch with Nelson, but she defends him from Inéz’s criticisms: “Everything was fine, nothing was a crisis, but nothing was a tremendous pleasure either. She didn’t expect Inéz to love him, but she ought to leave him be” (39). Noelle is also apathetic about the news of Lacey May’s sickness, which implies that something occurred between 1996 and 2018 to estrange them. What happened between them, how Noelle has changed, and what connection adult Noelle has to Ray, Jade, and Gee are all questions that will be answered as the story progresses.
