- Dwight seems to regard Jack as a personal pet project, and sets him to work on all kinds of stuff. Jack gets a paper route, joins the Boy Scouts and performs a ton of household tasks. Some of them are kind of out there.
- Case in point: multiple boxes of chestnuts, which Jack has to husk every night. It's tough work and Dwight won't let him wear gloves.
- He gets sympathy from his step-siblings, but they both have other things going on. Skipper is detailing his car and Norma's dating a local Native American boy named Bobby Crow.
- Norma tells Jack that she and Bobby once found a bloody hook on the door handle of his car. She makes him promise not to tell anyone
- Jack's hands are stained orange by the nuts. He gets grief for it at school and starts a fight over it at one point.
- Dwight takes Jack's money from the paper route, promising to hold it for him. Jack loafs on the route and misses his mom. Lots.
- Dwight takes him down to Seattle to see his mom, but sticks close to him all the time, lest he spill the beans on what a horrible human being Dwight is. For some inexplicable reason, Jack plays along.
- Dwight even goes to the Jack's Boy Scout meetings, signing on as an assistant scoutmaster and buying a shiny new uniform for himself while Jack gets a hand-me-down.
- They play happy father-son during the meetings, then Dwight tells Jack all about the things he did wrong once he got home.
- Despite that, Jack likes being a Scout. It fulfills his dreams of normal-dom, and lets him pretend he can assert some kind of control over his world by mastering all those merit badges.
- Jack's mom finally agrees to marry Dwight in March. Dwight responds by making Jack help him paint the whole house white. The furniture too.
- Mom calls up and asks Jack if everything is good. Jack says that it is. Jack is lying, and again, we're not quite sure why.
- The white-painting marathon concludes with the painting of a Baldwin piano in white… even the ivory keys.