Plum is clearly Eva's favorite child; even though he's an adult, she still refers to him as "my baby." She demonstrates such a deep and abiding love for Plum that when she saturates him in kerosene and strikes a match, we accept her heinous crime as an act of desperation born out of love.
In this chapter, there are several references to "top" and "bottom," and "high" and "low" that should be noted. In her house in the hillside Bottom, Eva resides on the top floor, directing the lives of everyone else below. When she sits in her wheelchair, a rocking chair fitted into a child's wagon, children are at eye level with her. Yet because of her matriarchal demeanor and regal bearing, adults who physically tower over her always feel as if they are looking up at her.
Eccentric though she is, Eva commands respect from the community. Her eighteen-month absence from her children remains an unsolved mystery, but whatever she did, seemingly it was for the good of the children. Respected as a woman who gets things done, her unusual penchant for taking in strays is peculiar, but it benefits the community's homeless. The community accepts Eva on her own terms, ignoring her disability and gossiping only now and then about it. Unlike Eva's daughter Hannah, who exasperates the women in town because of the number of their husbands whom she has sex with, Eva doesn't threaten the community even though she dominates people — whether it is during a spirited game of checkers, or renaming children, or deciding on matters of life and death.
