While Grazina naps upstairs, Hai finds three bottles of Dilaudid hidden in her kitchen armoire. The sight of the pills sends him back to the day he left rehab in September. Nurse Marylyn gently discharges him, prays over him, and sends him out into the rain with pamphlets and false encouragement. Instead of going straight home, Hai walks through East Gladness, chews a rain-soaked cigarette, and drifts back toward the housing project where he grew up.

Before facing his mother, Hai stops at Randy's window. Randy, once the neighborhood Candy Man and now a small-time dealer, sells Hai two oxycodone pills and two codeine pills, warns him not to mix them, and briefly remembers Hai as a child shouting for candy after school. Hai then sits alone under the park slide, thinking the pills could dull his mother's pain and his own fear, but he delays taking them. When he wakes and creeps to his mother's duplex, he sees her unexpectedly calm, dressed up, and smiling at her phone, and he cannot bring himself to destroy that private happiness.

Watching through the curtain also revives Hai's memory of the earlier night he returned from New York and told his mother he had dropped out of college after Noah's overdose and now owed the school money. Their argument turned vicious, with both of them attacking the other's failures until Hai smashed a box of chocolates and his mother fled upstairs. Ashamed and unwilling to wound her again, Hai walks away from her house, returns to Grazina's, swallows one of the stolen Dilaudids, hides the rest in his room, and gives himself over to the drug's warmth.

Later, on a Sunday before Christmas, Hai rides with Maureen and Russia to what Wayne has described as extra meatpacking work. At the farm they learn they have really been recruited to help slaughter hogs so the regular workers can still earn a holiday bonus. Wayne arms them for the job, explains the deceptive "free-range" and "organic" labels, and assigns Maureen to lure pigs with bacon-flavored dog treats while Hai and Russia use captive-bolt guns before Wayne cuts the animals' throats. The work is brutal, filthy, and disorienting, but Hai and Russia keep going because they need the money and because stopping would abandon the others midshift.

During a break, Hai lies to his mother on the phone, pretending he is in medical training and describing the pigs as anatomy specimens. Wayne overhears the strain in Hai's voice, recognizes the sound of a son lying to a parent, and opens up about his own estranged son Knight, his beloved dogs, and his belief that living cut off from one's people warps a life like a lone tree. Snow begins to fall as the workers wait for lunch, and Wayne tells a dubious story about "emperor hogs" and Christianity. They end the day having killed dozens of pigs; the promised bonus never comes, and Wayne later slips each of them fifty dollars out of pity or guilt. Standing in the snow with blood drying on their hands, the group laughs uneasily and claps purple dust into the air, and Hai realizes too late that he has forgotten to pray for the animals he helped kill.