Sal spends the night in the waiting room worrying Gram will die. In the morning, however, Gram is feeling better and insists on leaving. The boy who helped bring her to the hospital gives Sal his address and name: Tom Fleet. As they leave the hospital, Sal hears a “familiar warble” that makes her think of an aspen in Bybanks (97); Sal often heard singing coming from the tree but could never see a bird, and eventually concluded the tree itself was making the noise. On the day Sal learned her mother wouldn’t be returning, the tree remained silent. Gram takes the singing tree at the hospital as a hopeful sign, but as the family gets back on the road, Sal senses a change: “[T]he whispers no longer said, hurry, hurry or rush, rush. They now said, slow down, slow down” (98). 

Walking home from school one day, Phoebe presses Sal to warn her father about Mrs. Cadaver. When they arrive at Phoebe’s house, Mrs. Winterbottom offers Phoebe a brownie, but Phoebe complains that she’s already “too fat” before storming off (100). Sal accepts, thinking about how she had snapped at her own mother when she asked her to go for a walk just one day before she left.