New Year's Pig
- Narration switch! This chapter turns around the focus to Lou Ann Ruiz. We don't know who's narrating, though.
- As the narrator tells us, we meet Lou Ann on the day her husband, Angel Ruiz, leaves her. She's also pregnant. Yup, double whammy. But wait: that was a flash forward.
- Lou Ann visits the doctor for a prenatal exam, where she hears that she's gaining too much weight. Triple whammy?
- On the bright side, while she's on the bus ride home, she thinks about how nice it is not to be jostled and groped by men in public now that she's pregnant.
- Lou Ann stops at the Lee Sing Market as she takes the last leg of the journey home on foot, and gets the news that she's probably carrying a girl.
- When she finally gets back to her house, she sees right away that the house is much emptier than it should be. Her first thought is that she and her husband have been robbed.
- Then she realizes: her husband has moved out, and taken all of his stuff.
- On top of that, Angel has also taken whatever other things he considers "his." The TV, for example.
- Lou Ann wanders around in a state of semi-shock, until a group of costumed kids come knocking at her door.
- Suddenly, Lou Ann remembers that it's Halloween—and she forgot to pick up any candy at the grocery store. Not the greatest trick or treat, though we'd think with the whole pregnancy and getting left by her husband thing she can let that one slide.
- The kids would beg to differ. When the sweet little tykes threaten to soap her windows if she doesn't give them anything, Lou Ann takes some small change out of a piggy bank and gives them the pennies.
- By the time all of the trick-or-treating has stopped, Lou Ann is exhausted. And can we blame her?
- She's forced to go to bed with her shoes on, because she can't bend far enough over her pregnant belly to unbuckle them herself.
- She tosses and turns for hours, and finally cries "until her eye sockets felt empty" (2.39). Poor Lou Ann.