Homer "Doc" Noline Timeline and Summary

•  Back
• More 

• A young Doc watches his adolescent daughters asleep in Codi's bed after a long day of hanging out with the Domingos family at the graveyard for the Day of the Dead. Doc decides that they will never get to celebrate the holiday again, since those grandmothers are none of their business.
• Doc's mind is failing—he keeps thinking he's in times and places other than the here and now. He imagines, for instance, that he's saving his ten- and seven-year-old daughters from a flood in Tortoise Canyon.
• The flood did happen, and someone saved the girls, but it wasn't Doc. Doc was stuck at the hospital when the flood happened, and Eddie Dell, his neighbor, saved their lives.
• Doc hangs out with Codi, who has just returned to Grace. They meet up in his darkroom, where he's transforming a picture of a bunch of dudes into a picture of a pile of rocks. He turns out the lights, even though he knows quite well that Codi is scared of the dark.
• Doc remembers the time when Codi came home looking all types of pregnant. She had the "mask" of pregnancy—a band of flushed skin across the bridge of her nose. She looked just like his wife did when she was pregnant, but he didn't know how to tell Codi what he knew.
• Doc's memory is getting worse and worse. Sometimes when Codi shows up he's not sure which version of her he's talking to.
• Doc remembers the night Codi miscarried her child. He was terrified, and he tried to help by giving her pills to stop her bleeding and to stop the pain. He watched her bury the baby, and then went out to cover the grave so that animals wouldn't get to it, but he still never told her he knew.
• In the meantime, Doc's practice is suffering from his memory loss. He yells at Rita, a young woman who shows up pregnant, thinking for a moment that she's Codi, and Rita calls Codi up to tell her that Doc's losing his marbles.
• Doc and Codi talk, a little bit about Rita, but mostly about how he loses his nerve all the time as a doctor. It turns out that he never particularly cared if Codi became a doctor or something else, as long as she was doing what she was good at and was happy. Doc is still pretty sure that she's better than everyone else, though.
• Doc remembers taking away a cowboy suit from his daughters when they were little girls.
• Codi leaves town for Christmas, and in the meantime, Hallie is kidnapped. Hallie's commune-mates call Doc to tell him what happened, and they have a super weird conversation during which Doc isn't really sure who they are or what's happening, or whether he's speaking English or Spanish. Ultimately, he figures it out and tells Codi.
• After that, Doc starts to get bedridden, partly just because of misery.
• Doc takes himself to get a CAT scan, and his diagnosis is confirmed—it's Alzheimer's.
• Codi leaves, but when she comes back, she and Doc bury a bundle of objects that were Hallie's in the garden behind their house.
• Doc's lucid enough to basically apologize for being such a crappy dad, and he hugs Codi and tells her he loves her.
• We don't see it happen, but Doc dies within a year or two of the end of main part of the narrative. We know that because in the flash-forward final chapter, we see Codi decorating his grave for the Day of the Dead.