Victoria McQueen (“Vic”) is the novel’s main character. As a child, she is the product of a struggling marriage. She is brave, precocious, and enjoys helping others find lost items—making other people happy is often her substitute for an inability to make herself happy, a condition that will follow her throughout her life. What occasionally looks like happiness in Vic is itself ambivalent to observers: “That Vic smile, where only one corner of her mouth turned up, an expression that seemed somehow to suggest regret as much as happiness” (429). Her largest regret is her perception that she is an unfit mother: “All those years of hating her own mother, Vic had never imagined that she would do worse” (364). She mourns the possibility that her relationship with her own son could be better than her relationship with her parents.

Because her parents are often careless or neglectful of her needs, even though they may not mean to be, Vic develops an unreliable streak that will characterize her experience as a mother later. She is so pessimistic about her abilities to help those who love her that she is resigned to leaving Lou and Wayne at some point, even though she doubts she will have a good reason.