tory still lacks something very important. Paley has not really explained how the story turns out. After showing that both mother and son had become junkies, and that the son had met a girl who had helped him "clean up," Paley leaves the woman in a limbo state. The father wants to know what happens to her.
This dissatisfaction with Paley's methods once again mirrors her attitude toward life. The father wonders if maybe she is too tentative in her vision of the world. How could she let the reader not know what the woman's fate was, unless she had no faith in her recovery?
Paley disagrees with this, and she tells her father that the model for the woman was her next-door neighbor. What actually happen
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