Roberta and Jimmy Chance

Quick Facts

• Role: Loving, adoptive parents of Willow Chance
• First appearance: Opening chapter; recur through Willow’s memories and flashbacks
• Status: Deceased (car accident)
• Key relationships: Their daughter Willow; each other (a deeply unified partnership)
• Defining qualities: Nurturing, patient, protective, wholly devoted to Willow’s growth

Who They Are

Roberta and Jimmy Chance embody the safety and steadiness of an ideal home—the warm center of Willow’s early life. Though they exit the story almost immediately, their love frames everything that follows: their deaths catalyze Willow’s grief and spark the plot, while their memory becomes the compass she uses to navigate loss and rebuild connection. As touchstones of unconditional love, they anchor the novel’s exploration of Grief, Loss, and Healing, showing how an absent presence can still guide a child toward meaning.

Personality & Traits

At once ordinary and extraordinary, Roberta and Jimmy’s heroism lies in everyday acts of care. They meet Willow exactly where she is—brilliant, direct, and obsessed with systems—and make a home that amplifies her strengths rather than smoothing them away. Even their missteps (like withholding Roberta’s diagnosis) come from a fierce instinct to protect their child.

• Deeply loving: After seven years of infertility, they adore their daughter without condition; Willow’s emphatic “My Two Parents Really Truly L-O-V-E Me” reads as fact, not sentiment.
• Supportive and accepting: They turn their backyard into a lush garden to match Willow’s botanical passions and cheer on her medical research streaks (including her deep dive into Jimmy’s dermatitis).
• Patient guides: When Willow insists on wearing her gardening outfit to the first day of middle school, they respond with gentle coaching rather than shame, signaling trust in her self-definition.
• Protective to a fault: Roberta’s choice to hide her breast cancer diagnosis—meant to shield Willow—triggers the hurried clinic visit and the distracted drive that ends in tragedy.
• Physical details as contrast: Willow frames them as “two of the whitest white people,” noting Roberta’s fine red hair and pale blue eyes and Jimmy’s tall, bald presence and seborrheic dermatitis; the contrast clarifies that love, not likeness, binds their family.

Character Journey

Roberta and Jimmy don’t evolve on the page; instead, the story refracts them through Willow’s memory. Their characterization grows more luminous as Willow grieves, becoming a standard for goodness that she seeks to honor rather than replace. In their absence, Willow learns to extend the family they modeled—steady, generous, attentive—into a wider circle, laying the groundwork for a new Found Family and Community.

Key Relationships

• With Willow: Their relationship is the novel’s emotional baseline—a blueprint of nurture tailored to a singular child. They delight in Willow’s difference and create structures that let her thrive, embodying the book’s vision of Difference and Acceptance. When that bond is severed, Willow must relearn connection without the safety net they provided.
• With each other: Roberta and Jimmy operate as a seamless team. When Roberta is diagnosed, Jimmy immediately leaves work to stand beside her; they face fear together, and even their final moments—his hand reaching for her arm in the truck—show their reflex to connect first.

Defining Moments

Their on-page time is brief, but three moments shape the entire novel’s arc.

• The adoption (seventh day of the seventh month)
  • What happens: After a long struggle with infertility, they adopt Willow—a family story told with ritual reverence.
  • Why it matters: It establishes the depth and immediacy of their love and sets the number seven as a private family talisman that Willow carries forward.
• Roberta’s diagnosis
  • What happens: Roberta finds a breast tumor and chooses not to tell Willow, fearing the news would consume her medically inclined mind.
  • Why it matters: Her silence reveals a loving but flawed protective instinct; it also initiates the chain of events that leads to the accident.
• The car accident
  • What happens: Leaving the medical center in shock, Jimmy reaches to comfort Roberta; in that split second, he drives into an intersection and their truck is T-boned.
  • Why it matters: Their deaths shatter Willow’s world, ignite the novel’s central conflict, and transform their love from daily presence to guiding memory.

Essential Quotes

My Two Parents
Really
Truly
L-O-V-E
Me.

This compressed, line-broken declaration functions as a theorem in Willow’s life. The certainty—stated like data—shows how love has been the fixed variable in her otherwise unpredictable world, making their loss feel like the removal of gravity itself.

If you could see me, you would say that I don’t fit into an easily identifiable ethnic category.
I’m what’s called “a person of color.”
And my parents are not.
They are two of the whitest white people in the world (no exaggeration).

Willow’s framing highlights difference without distance. By stressing visual contrast, she underscores that family is built from sustained care and attention, not genetic similarity—a theme her later community will echo.

They wouldn’t tell her. Willow was far too interested in medicine to deal with this right now.
They would let her in on the situation when it was over.

This choice is tender but tragic. It shows their impulse to protect Willow’s mind—and misjudges her need for honesty—revealing the complexity of loving a gifted child whose curiosity is both solace and stressor.

Jimmy’s hand reached over and touched his wife’s arm and at the exact moment that he made this connection, the world literally came apart.

The sentence binds intimacy and catastrophe: the gesture that defines their marriage—reaching for each other—coincides with the impact that ends their lives. It crystallizes the novel’s inciting incident while preserving the couple’s defining image: connection, even at the brink.