55 pages • 1 hour read
Kristina McMorrisSold on a Monday
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018A 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 21-23Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 21 Summary
When Ellis and Lily return, Lily calls the sanitorium from her work and learns from the workers that Geraldine died.
They also learn that Alfred J. Millstone, who lives in Long Beach, California, is the banker that bought the kids. Ellis asks Dutch to use his contacts in San Francisco to look into Millstone. Then Ellis’s mother, Myrna, comes for an unexpected visit. Ellis has no important leads, so he agrees to take her to lunch.
Myrna tells Ellis why his father dislikes reporters. Jim was involved in freeing a breaker boy from the gears at a mining accident. When Jim brought the child out and laid him on the ground, reporters started taking pictures and often the newspapers had the stories before the families. Jim attacked the reporter, who sued the coal company, which settled the lawsuit but required Jim to apologize publicly, which he did. The family then moved to Allentown. Myrna tells Ellis that his father is proud of him. But Jim’s connection of reporters to his own past and grief makes it hard to express his love for Ellis. Ellis thinks his “father’s coolness began long before” he became a reporter (154).
When Ellis returns from lunch, Dutch tells him that Millstone was in a story concerning a child.
Chapter 22 Summary
Lily is in the office reading about the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. She thinks the story needs Mrs. Lindbergh’s opinion, so she pitches the idea to Trimble. He initially laughs it off. But she persists, arguing that Mrs. Lindbergh could make an appeal to the public for her child and speak directly to the kidnappers. When pressed to explain why Mrs. Lindbergh would speak to Lily, she responds because she is a mother, which the chief treats as a hypothetical answer and ignores her request.
Lily decides to meet Clayton for lunch, since he rarely asks her for lunch given their desire to keep work and romance separate. In the elevator, Clayton’s response to her concern over the Lindbergh case and the police response is: “you worry too much” (158). He then suggests that the police should not deal with Lindbergh’s mobster friends. Lily disagrees and questions whether Clayton would still feel that way if the child were his. Lily apologizes and then, surprisingly, kisses Clayton on the lips.
But they do not make lunch because just as they are leaving the building, Lily spots Geraldine entering the building.
Chapter 23 Summary
Ellis learns that Millstone and his wife lost their child in a car accident two years earlier. Ellis assumes that they bought the Dillard children to heal their loss. Ellis tracks down Millstone to a bank in Hoboken, New Jersey, and sets off to meet him. When Millstone refuses him an appointment, he stakes out the bank, using skills from his Society pages days when he would need to get a celebrity’s photo. When Millstone emerges from the bank, Ellis follows him because he wants to give Geraldine peace of mind that her children were okay.
Ellis walks onto Millstone’s porch and looks through the window. He sees Ruby and hears a boy giggling, which he believes is Calvin. Then Millstone walks outside and demands to know what Ellis is doing on his porch. Ellis identifies himself as a reporter from the Herald Examiner working on a story about bank leaders after the 1929 crash, since “trust in the banking community’s been set back a bit” (166). Millstone agrees to be interviewed at two o’clock the next day.
When Ellis arrives back at his apartment, Lily is calling. Geraldine came to the Examiner looking for him.
Chapters 21-23 Analysis
The story’s setting expands to include Hoboken, New Jersey, to include the Millstone family, and the news that the Lindbergh baby has been kidnapped, which adds even more motivation for Lily with yet another child to pray for.
With this expanse in geographical area, the new information is accompanied by new settings. The Millstone family is connected with Geraldine and Ellis and the Reeds in that they too know what it means to experience the loss of a child in the family, adding further depth to the theme of grief. For the Millstones, however, Ellis and Lily assume that in order to lessen their grief, to fill a need in their life, they have chosen to pay for two other children.
The return of Geraldine is a major plot twist. Both Lily and Ellis believe she is dead. The sanitorium tells Lily that she is dead, which is obviously a lie. With this wrench thrown into the plot, both Ellis and Lily must reevaluate the steps they’ve taken and what they believed up to this point. But Ellis and Lily make a great team. Their reporting skills are top notch, just as Lily believed they would be.
Ellis learns about the reason behind why his father treats his career choice so dismissively. He wants to believe his mother, but he knows that his father has held a grudge against him for more years than his mother would like to admit. But his mother’s role as peacemaker leaves Ellis much to think about even though he believes that he and his father are like two strangers passing on a street. Ellis realizes, however, that his father is a scarred individual as well, someone who, like Ellis, is so far unable to let go of the past.
Lily pitches yet another idea to the chief, only for him to dismiss her once again. However, she tells him that her position as a mother makes her the right person for the job. Lily finally comes into her own and publicly admits having a child. This underscores her newfound strength in her personal and professional life. The news of the Lindbergh baby makes her realize that, while the Lindberghs are celebrities with considerable resources to help find their child, the Dillards have only Lily and Ellis. Also haunted by her past (when she considered abortion), she wants to do the right thing by helping the sold children.
