Sold on a Monday

Lily is a young Catholic woman who lives at home with her parents and her son on the weekends, and in a home for unwed mothers during the week. She is a secretary in a newsroom but wants to be reporter, like Ellis. Motherhood is her greatest gift and her greatest worry. She is the ultimate multitasker—she takes care of her son, works at her job, helps Ellis with the reporting, and still finds time to pitch her own column and date Clayton. 

Lily is Ellis’s love interest, but she is also critical to helping Ellis find the children and she is the one who initially pushes for the family’s reunification.  Her character is the moral voice throughout the story: She does not waiver in her convictions; there is a right way and a wrong way to go through life. And no matter how many mistakes Ellis makes, she withholds judgment, likely because she was the subject of discrimination as a pregnant teen.

This character undergoes a considerable transformation, from a woman who is scared to put her motherhood on display to a woman who embraces it. And in so doing helps herself and others, particularly the children, but also Ellis. 

Jim is Ellis’s father, husband to Myrna, and father to Henry (who died as an infant). He loves his family, but since the death of his son, for which he takes personal responsibility, he has been unable to express his emotions. He rarely laughs, rarely engages in conversation, and is a cold person. But he loves his son, showing him his love indirectly by consistently working on Ellis’s car and enjoying baseball games with Ellis.

Jim is also unwavering in his convictions. He holds strong views on working, and on journalism and journalists, because he had bad experiences with unethical journalistic practices. He also believes in a good day’s work producing things of value for the community, not contributing to gossip.

He comes to understand that his son needs him, and choses to open up and let his son get to know him, to be the father that Ellis needs. In so doing, he makes amends with Ellis, tells him that he knows he will do right by the Dillards, and that if Ellis ever needs help, he is there for him.

Ruby is Geraldine’s eight-and-a-half-year-old daughter and Calvin’s sister, one of the two siblings sold to the Millstones. She likes to wear shirtless overalls that are a bit too small. She wears her blond hair in a ponytail. A sign of her family’s poverty is her coveralls. But she is an enterprising young girl who sells Ellis some flowers. She is observant: She knows he was leaving parcels and knew her neighbor’s business. And she is capable; she knows how to take care of Calvin and herself.

Ruby is central to the story because she is one of the children who is sold, but she is also who Sylvia is fixated on. And because Sylvia wants only Ruby, Sylvia sends Calvin away, leaving Ruby all alone at the Millstones. When that happens, Sylvia tries to strip Ruby of her identity. But Ruby is resourceful. When she finds out that her mother has taken Calvin because he is all she can afford, she learns how to work from Claire so that she can earn her keep: She will not be a burden on her mother. Ruby eventually reunites as a family with her mother and Calvin by the end of the narrative.

Geraldine is a homemaker who lost her husband to lock jaw, after he stepped on a nail. She is suffering from an illness that her doctor diagnoses as tuberculosis, and he gives her only a few months to live. She has ashen skin, blackened eyes, and is quite thin. She takes care of her two children.

Geraldine sells her children to the Millstones, but she does it because she is very sick and very scared. She is prideful. Even though she took the money for the children, she never spent it. Instead, she put it in a jar so that she could look at it and remind herself of what she had done. She lived with the shame of selling her children. But she is a kind person, too. When she found out that the doctor did not arrive to look at Samuel, she asks to go and help even though she hardly knows Lily.

Geraldine changes over time. At the sanitorium, she finds out that she was misdiagnosed. She takes a job and remains there to rebuild some semblance of a life. She becomes a health care worker and teaches Lily a few things about treating fevers. She is also a loving mother, who wanted only what was best for her children. She didn’t want to give up her children, so when faced with the opportunity to get them back, she does. And when she finally has them both in her hands, she declares that they are her children and she is taking them with her.

Clayton is a byline reporter at the Examiner. He is of German descent, a broad-shouldered, fair-haired chain smoker, often in the newsroom with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He is nosey and always interested in running down the next story, particularly the stories about mobsters. Lily’s parents like him because he is a kind, respectful, a Catholic, confident, and does not get offended when Samuel ignores him. And he is okay with dating an unwed mother.

Clayton’s character is both a foil and role model to Ellis. Since he dates Lily, and is too good a person for Ellis to truly dislike or dismiss, but he is in the way of Ellis pursuing Lily. However, because he is an accomplished reporter, with his own byline, and always hunting down a story, he is someone that Ellis would like to emulate.

Clayton is a steady and easygoing person who doesn’t rile easily. However, he does show some aspects of sexism when he speaks to Lily in a way that she thinks is condescending. However, he does support her career and when she breaks it off with him, he accepts it gracefully and lets her know that she is a good person.

Howard Trimble is the editor and chief of the Examiner. He is Lily’s boss and Ellis’s boss and the one who assigned Ellis the feature story of the picture of the children for sale. Trimble is also the eldest son of the newspaper’s founder, so he inherited the family business. He likes to wear bowties, his glasses low on his nose, and he has eyebrows as thick as his beard, which gives him a kindly look until he begins to speak because he is quite prone to rants and yelling out orders around the newsroom. He is a micro-manger, following every detail of the newsroom.

Trimble is loud, disrespectful, and wedded to gender norms of the day. He refuses to allow Lily to become a reporter and dismisses her requests, wanting only to relegate her to the Sunday women’s sections. But he is also willing to change because he eventually agrees that Lily can write a column about single parents, and not in the traditional Food Section of the newspaper. He does so because his father drank away the family’s money and it was his mother that raised him and his brothers.

Sylvia is in her 30s. She’s the wife of Alfred and the mother of a daughter who died in a car crash, Victoria. She is the sister of the Italian mobster Max Trevino. Sylvia suffers with severe depression. She sees the picture of Ruby and Calvin for sale and convinces her husband to buy them.

Sylvia deteriorates throughout the narrative, changing from what initially appears to be a stable person who is managing some aspects of her life now that she has Ruby, whom she treats like Victoria, and now that Calvin has been sent away. But once Lily interviews her and lets her know they are looking for Calvin, she starts to unravel. She threatens Ellis with a fake charge of harming a child, she refuses to surrender Ruby to her mother, and then she ultimately shoots both Geraldine and Ellis. Though an antagonist, Sylvia also symbolizes how devastating grief can be, and how little people addressed mental illness at a time of widespread depression and hardship.

Alfred is the husband of Sylvia, and the father of a deceased daughter, Victoria. He is a successful banker who provides well for his family. He is a kind person, according to Ellis, and is trying his best to protect and care for Sylvia. He is the brother-in-law of Max Trevino.

Alfred tries to keep his family together. He loves Sylvia and grieves the loss of his daughter. When Sylvia comes to the jail to talk to Ellis, Alfred tries to get her to leave, but Sylvia is not interested in listening to him. Again, when they are in the living room with Ellis and Geraldine, he tries to make Sylvia see that they are fine together. And even when Sylvia accuses him of killing Victoria to get her out of the way, he cannot stand up to her; all he can do is plead with her to understand that he loves Victoria, too, and her death was an accident. Though well-off, Alfred is ultimately a man without much power in his own household, thus a symbol of how impotent humankind is in the face of larger social issues like death, mental illness, crime, and a debilitating economy.