Jack is a working-class man and the narrator of “Feathers.” Jack and his wife, Fran, are unfulfilled with their lives and their financial instability, and Jack believes that they both agree they do not want children. He places a lot of emphasis on Fran’s appearance, pressuring her to keep her blond hair long even though it would be much simpler for her at work if she cut it. When Fran decides that she wants Jack to impregnate her after an evening with Jack’s coworker and their infant, Jack discovers that he was less aware of his wife’s desires than he believed. From Jack’s perspective, the story illustrates how two people can spend their lives together but become distant and separate when they stop communicating. Jack perpetuates this distance at the end of the story when he remains silent about the way Fran changes after pregnancy and the child he does not particularly like

Edna drops a healthy relationship and everything in her life when her ex-husband Wes tells her that he is sober and asks her to live with him at a rented house near the ocean. Despite their clearly tumultuous past due to Wes’s alcoholism, Edna gives him yet another chance.