The Sunday Following Mother's Day

The moment in the story I chose to focus on was at the Children's Center when Madeleine is talking to Arnisa while waiting for her father to return from the store.

"Madeleine felt she knew this woman, knew her children, who were destined for nowhere, knew her common-law husband with his unreliable trash-heap of a car, knew this woman and her wig of 'real human hair!' as the television ads proclaimed. Knew their tabloid lives. It occurred to her that they were a part of the same tribe as the nearly toothless man who had come to her door that morning, saying he was her father."

I believe it was at this moment that Madeleine decided that she did not want anything to do with her father that she was ashamed of him, and I also believe she finally acknowledges to herself that she is angry at him. It is a turning point for her, but I think it also stands as a small representation of the story as a whole. In this moment, any fantasies of a reconciliation with her estranged father vanish. Madeleine equates Arnisa's raggedy family and car and wig with her father's shabby unmatched clothes, missing teeth, worn-out car, and drug-store chocolates.

When her father first appeared at her door, Jones tells us "What she saw was not the man in the letters with the beautiful handwriting, not the man of the poems". She was finally aware of the chasm between the father that she had invented in her mind and the one of reality standing before her. She was mad at him for not being the fantasy father she had hoped for, and probably mad at herself for inventing him. She may have even blamed him (or his name) for causing her son's retardation. I think Madeleine is also afraid that she may end up like Arnisa with a common-law husband and a child that is quite literally going nowhere.