The Last Thing He Told Me

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021

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Symbols & Motifs

The Houseboat

When Hannah lives in Manhattan, she spends her days surrounded by concrete, steel, and asphalt. Her business in New York is successful, but she sees limits in her personal life and despairs of ever meeting a nice guy in New York.

When Hannah moves to Sausalito to marry Owen, her surroundings drastically change. She moves into the houseboat on which Owen lives in the San Francisco Bay, a boat offering wide vistas of open water through its glass walls. The houseboat is also vulnerable to flooding, as are the other 400 boats in the aquatic neighborhood. In contrast, Hannah’s workshop is a house nearby, rooted in the earth and solidly underfoot.

The houseboat represents the life Hannah took on when she married Owen and became Bailey’s stepmother: a life that, while pleasant and outwardly beautiful, is also fragile and lacks roots. It also lacks privacy, which is an aspect of small-town Sausalito Hannah dislikes since she feels observed and judged by the neighbors.

It is no surprise, then, that although Hannah and Bailey return to Sausalito after Owen’s disappearance and their trip to Austin, Hannah sells the houseboat as soon as Bailey graduates, and moves to Los Angeles where she is once again surrounded by the reliably solid elements of concrete, steel, and asphalt and the anonymity of a large city.

Wood

At the beginning of the chapter sections, Dave includes quotations about wood from sources as diverse as Confucius to Albert Einstein. This reflects Hannah’s career as a woodworker, which was also her grandfather’s trade.

Hannah works with a variety of wood and tells Owen each piece of wood holds a unique characteristic, something that makes the piece distinct. In order to peel back the layers and discover what the wood was, Hannah says, you often have to work the wood from several angles. Hannah explains the lesson her grandfather taught her about wood’s hidden beauty as follows:

The first lesson he ever taught me was that it wasn’t just about shaping a block of wood into what you wanted it to be. That it was also a peeling back, to seeing what was inside the wood, what the wood had been before. It was the first step to creating something beautiful. The first step to making something out of nothing (89).

For Hannah, wood represents possibilities, solidity, and strength, which is why she often mixes wood and metal in her furniture. Thus, it is no surprise she makes wedding rings for herself and Owen from wood and steel to symbolize the strength of their union and the new life they are creating. In the final chapter, when a barely recognizable Owen approaches Hannah, it is this unique wedding ring that allows Hannah to realize that the man in front of her is her husband.

Bailey’s Piggy Bank

Bailey’s piggy bank is not unusual in any way, but rather a decorative item many children possess—or so Hannah thinks until the weekend she, Owen, and Bailey evacuate their houseboat, which is in danger of being flooded, and take refuge in a San Francisco hotel. When Hannah wakes up at 3 a.m. and discovers Owen is not in the hotel room, she finds him at the bar downstairs; in front of him is Bailey’s piggy bank. Hannah initially chalks this up to sentimentality, but after Owen disappears and she finds the initials “L. Paul” on the will stored on Owen’s laptop, the piggy bank takes on new significance.

Hannah remembers that “Lady Paul” is written on the piggy bank and Jules discovers the bank contains a safe. Once it is opened, the safe reveals an updated copy of Owen’s will, which lists Hannah (first among others) as Bailey’s guardian. This reinforces Hannah’s belief that Owen left her to protect Bailey because he trusts Hannah and knows he can count on her to interpret his wishes for Bailey.

The piggy bank, then, with its internal safe, represents the secure fortress Owen tried to create for Bailey by removing her from Austin and the reach of her mother’s family. The outer appearance of the piggy bank, which is both pretty and in no way noteworthy, is like the new life Owen established for himself and Bailey in Sausalito—a nice life, but one like so many others and thus not worthy of undue attention. The vault inside the piggy bank is the carefully constructed system of fail safes designed to be reached only by the one person who can find them—Hannah—and which serve a singular purpose: to protect Bailey. Owen’s primary goal, as reflected in the will inside the piggy bank’s safe, is to ensure Bailey grows up happy, safe, and intact. In order to do that, Owen had to create a fortress around his daughter and wrap that fortress in an innocuous life that would not attract attention.