Dear Zoe

Nick DeNunzio, Tess’s charismatic biological father and her mother’s ex-husband, occupies a moral gray area in the book. Nick is a loving father who cares a great deal for Tess, and he allows her to come live with him while Tess copes with the loss of Zoe. On the other hand, Nick is unable to hold a steady job and has a chip on his shoulder. He breeds German Shepherds part time and deals drugs, which Tess discovers later in the book. Nick is an excellent cook who once considered going to culinary school, and he and Tess bond through cooking elaborate meals and eating food. At night, he drinks until he passes out, his form of escapism. Nick’s presence, however, is a nourishing one for Tess, and they have an easy relationship, though at times she’s humiliated by him, especially his rotating fleet of falling-apart cars. He owes Tess’s mother a good deal of money in child support payments.

Nick is religious, attending church every Sunday with his mother and grandmother, and lives in a noticeably lower-income neighborhood than Tess’s mother and stepfather, David. Nick serves as a foil for David, who is more of a disciplinarian, interested in pushing Tess academically and pressuring her to get good grades and go to a good college. Nick, in contrast, doesn’t put pressure on Tess to be anything other than the person she is. He has very few rules at his house, but he forbids Tess from hanging out with Jimmy Freeze, which she realizes later is because Jimmy helps Nick deal drugs. Ironically, Nick provides a kind of stability Tess needs, away from her family, enabling her to process her grief in a different environment. Nick keeps an old wedding photo of Tess’s mother, suggesting his attachment and devotion to her, even though the marriage ended in divorce.

David, Tess’s stepfather, married Tess’s mother when Tess was five after meeting Tess’s mother in the grocery store. An attorney who did musical theater in high school, he is responsible, has always had a plan for life, and worries about Tess’s academic performance. He is preoccupied with and extremely annoyed by the length of Tess’s makeup routine, and he tries to find ways to help her make her routine more time and cost efficient, though his efforts come off as critical and judgmental. David, like Tess, writes, and once he wrote a story about Tess, but Tess feels he did not adequately capture their relationship. David has a good relationship with Nick, which, counterintuitively, irritates Tess. At the beginning of the book, Tess feels excluded from David and her mother’s experience of grief. David uses his work as an escape mechanism, spending long hours at the office.

Though Tess has known David since she was a child, she notes that he remains a “shadowy figure” for her. His relationship with her is different than his relationship with Em and Zoe: David is physically affectionate with Em and Zoe, but when Tess was a child, he was more hands-off. David and Tess often just miss understanding each other, and Tess feels they’re “something less than father and daughter,” defensively asserting “it’s not tragic or anything” (7). While Tess’s mom is incapacitated from grief after Zoe’s death, David and Tess split childcare responsibilities, with David getting Em ready for school in the morning and Tess getting her ready for bed at night. Tess notes that their relationship is unique because she got to see David and her mother fall in love, but she also worries that they might fall out of love, especially given her mother’s flirtation with Justin, the grocery clerk. By the end of the novel, David is more physically affectionate with Tess, giving her strong hugs every morning before he leaves for work.