Skip to Main Content

Seventeen Against the Dealer

See More Retailers

About The Book

Do you have to lose everything to see what truly matters? Find out in the seventh and final installment of Cynthia Voigt’s Tillerman cycle.

Dicey Tillerman has big dreams. She’s started a boatbuilding business, and she’s determined to prove she can succeed on her own. That’s why she resists the offer of help from Cisco, the mysterious stranger who turns up one day at her shop.
But running a business doesn’t leave much time for the people Dicey treasures—her grandmother, her younger siblings, and her boyfriend, Jeff. Then it turns out that Dicey has placed her trust with the wrong person. Suddenly she stands to lose everything….Has Dicey discovered too late what really matters to her?
Cynthia Voigt deftly navigates nuances of identity and resilience in this triumphant conclusion to her acclaimed Tillerman cycle.

Excerpt

Seventeen Against the Dealer CHAPTER 1
Dicey?”

She heard him, but didn’t hear him. His voice entered her consciousness the way the first sounds of morning enter a dream and become part of it, before you wake up into the real day. The smell of paint lingered, although she had cocked open the high windows and raised the wide metal door. The paint had a penetrating odor that hung on in the air. The curved sides of the dinghy shone with fresh color. She’d scraped and sanded the bottom before painting the sides. When this paint dried she’d put the boat up on the storage rack for the rest of the winter; and the job would be done because the bottom paint wouldn’t go on until spring. Bottom paint was still wet when the boat went into the water. Green stains had splotched her jeans, her sneakers, her arms, hands, and face. Probably her hair, too, if she had a mirror to see it. She looked at her hands, the nails ringed with green, even after the scrubbing she’d given them in the shop’s dank little bathroom. The hands she watched went right on with their work—as if she didn’t exist—stroking the whetstone against the blade of the adze.

She was reviewing her plans. Dicey Tillerman always had things planned out so she could get to where she wanted. Where she wanted to get to was being a boatbuilder. Sailboats, she wanted to build sailboats. Not fancy yachts, but a boat a person could sail alone, or two people could sail.

Dicey knew you didn’t get what you wanted just by wanting it. She’d worked the last two summers, over in Annapolis, to learn things she needed to know. She’d learned some carpentry, she’d cut and sewn sails, and this fall she’d hired herself out to a boatyard in Crisfield, never mind the rotten pay, to learn what you were contracting for when you offered winter storage and maintenance for boats.

The boats she wanted to build were wooden ones. She wanted to build a boat with a carved rudder to guide it by and the long, varnished tiller under your hand. Not plywood, either. Dicey Tillerman had an idea about a slender, soft-bellied boat built out of planks of wood fitted together so close it was as if they’d grown that way, sturdy enough for heavy winds but light enough so the slightest breeze would fill the sails and move it across the water.

“Dicey?”

For now, however, the shop came first, and the shop work—repair, maintenance, storage. She knew that nobody hired you to build a sailboat right away, first thing. She also had an idea for a dinghy, one that could be powered either by a motor or by oars. Her plan was to get herself a name for building dinghies, save up the profits, and then—when she was ready—start taking orders for sailboats.

So the next thing she needed, now that she had the shop and tools, and a bank account, was work. She didn’t expect it to be easy. She knew that nobody had done what she planned to do, start her own boatyard, from nothing. At least, nobody she knew in Crisfield, or Annapolis, or the points between had done it. Boatyards were inherited, father to son, or bought out. Nobody just started one. But nobody had done a lot of what she’d done in her life, like getting her family down to Crisfield when they were all just kids, or even dropping out of college when she’d been offered a scholarship to continue. Just because nobody had done something didn’t mean that Dicey couldn’t.

Standing with her feet planted apart in front of the workbench, the light falling over her shoulder, wearing a sweatshirt no amount of laundering ever got clean, Dicey fingered the honed blade of the adze and then, satisfied, hung it in its place overhead, between the long saw and the squat broadax. All the blades above her gleamed like polished silver. She wrapped the oilstone in its cloth and set it aside in its metal box; the box she put on the storage shelf under the table’s surface, beside the row of wooden-handled screwdrivers and hammers, and the pile of plastic containers that kept nails and screws sorted out by sizes, each container labeled with adhesive tape on which she’d made dark pencil marks—and gradually she heard him, standing still by the doorway just behind her. The sense of his being there rose up in her, as quiet and sure as a tide rising up along the shore. It was as if his silence awoke her.

The pane of glass shone dark behind his head, the darkness of early winter nights. His gray eyes watched her, had been watching her; she was glad to see him. “You’re early,” she said.

“Actually,” Jeff told her, “I’m late. I thought you’d prefer that.”

“Actually,” she mimicked him, “you’re right.” She stretched her arms up high over her head, stretched the muscles along her back, then walked down the shop to turn off lights. It was like a cave, the shop. Square, about twenty feet by twenty feet, the cinder block walls rose up from a slab cement floor. The high windows snapped up shut, closing out the darkness; she’d pulled down the broad metal doorway that opened onto the water when the afternoon temperature started to fall; so the shop felt like a cave, too, it felt like a treasure cave. Some treasure, Dicey thought, and grinned. One dinghy, belly up on a rack at the center of the shop. Two more dinghies stacked on racks against the wall, waiting for the same caretaking. On the other hand, their monthly storage fees would pay what she wanted to give her grandmother every month, and because she was underpricing local boatyards, she could hope for more boats to winter next year—yeah, they were treasures.

Her tools were treasures, too, and they might in fact be worth something, at least to a collector. She’d picked them up over the last couple of years, in junk shops mostly, and at yard sales—hammers, screwdrivers, planes, and the cutting tools. She’d soaked and sanded those tools, honed and polished them, and even carved out a replacement handle for the broadax. She couldn’t have afforded new tools, and, anyway, the new weren’t made with the same care as the old. The old were made to last lifetimes.

And Jeff Greene, in a thick, dark sweater that rose up around his neck, standing waiting in front of the shop door, his thumbs hooked in his pockets, just watching her, probably knowing exactly what she was thinking . . . the thought made her smile.

“You look,” he told her, “like the cat that swallowed the canary.”

She reached up over the worktable to turn out the final light. “I feel like the cat that figured out how to get into a cream factory. That’s how I feel. Cream is better than canaries. Canaries have feathers, and bones, and beaks, and claws, too. I’d think a cat that swallowed a canary would look pretty sick, Jeff.”

He laughed, and turned to open the door. With all the shop lights out, the door’s glass pane showed a whiter, mist-filled darkness outside. “You haven’t hung your sign out yet,” Jeff said, looking down at the carved wooden sign that leaned against the wall beside the door. “I thought you’d have it hung by noon on Christmas.”

“If it’s outside, I can’t look at it.” Her brother had made it for her, cutting the letters deep into a piece of mahogany, staining them dark so they would show up against the paler wood, and then varnishing it, coat after careful coat, so it would stand up against weather. TILLERMAN BOATS, the sign read. Dicey saw it clear in her memory, even though in the lightlessness she couldn’t distinguish the letters. “It’s a good thing Sammy took wood shop, or I don’t know what I’d have gotten for Christmas.”

“He’s got clever hands,” Jeff said.

“And he likes making things,” she added. Sammy had even roped James into making a half-court, a backboard to play tennis alone on, one summer; at the garage where he’d been hired to pump gas, he now spent most of his time working on engines. It was Sammy who kept their old pickup going for them. It was even Sammy who’d found it, and talked them into it, telling them it could be got running, he could do it easily, and at the price, which was only $485, he said—ignoring Gram’s raised eyebrows at the sum—they’d never find anything cheaper. “Who needs a wheeled vehicle?” Gram had demanded. “We do,” Sammy had told her. “You do, and you need a license, too. Maybe we can’t afford it, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need it. And we can afford it.” Sammy had set his mind to it. Like anything else Sammy set his mind to, it got done. They insured it in Gram’s name, because she was the cheapest; Sammy was the only one of them who didn’t have a license at that point, and he’d turn sixteen in less than a year.

Jeff hurried Dicey along. “It’s after six. They’re waiting for us. Should I call and say we’re leaving now?” Dicey shook her head and followed him outside. He waited while she locked the door and took a final look. The shop lay quiet, the boats thick black masses in the darkness inside.

She let Jeff pull her by the hand toward his car, telling her with mock comfort, “You’ll be back tomorrow. It’s only a few hours’ separation.”

“No, it isn’t. Tomorrow’s New Year’s Day.”

“Then the day after. It’s only a few more hours. I don’t know why you’re in such a hurry.”

“Why shouldn’t I be? I know what I want to do, I’ve got enough money in the bank to pay six months’ rent and utilities, I’ve got storage and maintenance fees coming in—and I’ve got probably the best set of tools in the county. Some of them,” she added, “given to me by the man I love.” She put her arm around his waist and felt his arm go around her shoulder. “What more do I need?”

“You could marry me,” he suggested.

“I could but I can’t.”

“You mean you won’t.”

“I mean no, Jeff.”

“No you don’t,” he corrected her, lifting her bike into the back of the station wagon. “You mean not now, not yet.”

“I don’t think I’d ever marry anyone else,” she told him, fastening the seat belt. She had it planned—first the boats and then marrying Jeff.

“In that case,” he said, half of his attention on backing the car around the parking lot, “why don’t you marry me now and get it over with?”

Dicey turned her head sharply to look at him. “That wouldn’t get anything over with, it would just start things up. Cripes, Jeff,” she protested, and then laughed. “You make it sound so tempting.” She could no more imagine him not in her life than she could imagine not having her brothers and sister there, or Gram. Jeff Greene, since the time she’d first met him—over eight years ago now—had got woven into her life so thoroughly that, she thought, picturing it—the warp threads and the woof threads, all the colors and the intricate design—if he weren’t in it . . . everything would look entirely different, and feel different, too. Even the texture wouldn’t be what it was without Jeff.

“Besides,” Jeff said, “I’m still in school.”

Dicey grunted her agreement.

“Although I’m graduating this year, so I’m almost through. But I’ll probably go to grad school.”

“I’d think so.”

“So I don’t have a job to support you with. Although we could easily live on my allowance. Think of the savings in phone bills.”

“My phone bills aren’t bad.” They drove through town and turned onto a country road.

“I know. I know they aren’t.”

“I’ve been busy, you know that, Jeff. I’ve been working.”

“If you married me, you wouldn’t have to worry about being too busy to call me up,” Jeff pointed out. “Or write me letters.”

“Can we talk about something else? I don’t like feeling guilty.”

For a second, Dicey was afraid he would apologize. Instead, he told her, “You don’t feel guilty.”

He was right, she thought, grinning away, feeling good.

“And why should you feel guilty, anyway,” Jeff asked, “for doing what you always said you wanted to do?” But he said this as if he was reminding himself, not telling her.

Then she did feel guilty. “You know I’ll come home with you. Live with you while you’re home. Whenever you say, I will—you know that,” she reminded him. “Your father’s away, we wouldn’t be imposing on anyone.” Whenever they had this conversation, she always hoped that this time Jeff would say yes.

“You know that won’t work,” he said, as usual. “I’m not good at half-measures, Dicey. Besides, it’s too risky.”

“I know how not to get pregnant.”

“It’s not about not getting pregnant.”

She heard it in his voice, something angry, or sad, and turned in her seat to face him, to see his face. “What, sex?”

“I don’t think of it as sex,” he said. “I think of it as making love. And I think love deserves the best from me that I can give it. Which is a lot more than shacking up with you for Christmas vacation.”

Dicey reached her hand across to touch the back of his neck. “I’m sorry—I said it badly—Jeff? I’m tired, I’m stupid with tiredness.”

“It’s okay,” he said, and meant it. “You’ve been working too hard for too long.”

“That part’s coming to an end now, I think.”

Dicey leaned back in her seat, while the dark night hurried past the windows and the dark road ran under the wheels. Work had laid the groundwork, and now the shop was started. She had always gotten things done; working hard, and harder, was what worked for her. She was bankrolling her own business because for the last six months she’d held down two jobs. Eight to four at Claude’s boatyard, learning what had to be done and how to do it, meeting people who might hire her on her own, and then the night shift at the McDonald’s up in Salisbury. Days spent sweating herself dry and nights togged out in a little orange-and-yellow outfit, inhaling the smell of grease and industrial-strength cleanser, taking orders and money from person after person, from an endless procession of people impatient to fill their bellies. Sometimes she thought if she never saw another hamburger in her whole life, it would be too soon. Sometimes, even, she thought if she never saw another human being, too.

Dicey was glad those six months were behind her, but she was even gladder for her bank account. She was on her way to where she planned to get to because of those months, which was what really mattered.

At the mailbox they turned right into the driveway, moving slowly. The two fields, one on either side, lay dark and empty. The belt of pines that fenced the fields made a tall, dark wall. Then the driveway curved into the pines and Dicey could see the lighted windows of the house. Jeff drove around to the back and parked beside the pickup, in front of the barn. The car headlights shone briefly on the tarpaulin Sammy spread out to protect his tennis court, the beams of light reflecting off small black puddles formed by the mist, which gathered together if there was no soil to absorb it. Jeff turned off the engine and the lights, unbuckled himself, and then—as Dicey had hoped he would—he gathered her into his arms. The silky feel of his hair, and his strong young shoulders—the clean smell of him and the distant beating of his heart from deep inside his body—If she thought about it, Dicey didn’t see how she was going to stand having Jeff go away again, back to school. She didn’t think about it.

Reading Group Guide

A Reading Group Guide to

The Tillerman Cycle
By Cynthia Voigt

About the Books

The four Tillerman children—Dicey, James, Maybeth, and Sammy—have always presented a unified front to the world in spite of the troubles they encounter. Even when they are abandoned by their emotionally ill mother, they find strength in each other as they search desperately for a place to call home. As they build a new life with their grandmother, however, they must learn how to remain a close-knit unit under very different circumstances than those they had previously known. And as they grow up and begin to follow their own separate dreams, it becomes more and more difficult to remember just how important family can be. Cynthia Voigt's moving Tillerman books—which trace journeys both physical and emotional—have garnered many honors, including a Newbery Medal for Dicey’s Song and a Newbery Honor for A Solitary Blue.

Discussion Topics

1. When their mother leaves, Dicey takes responsibility for the younger children and becomes, in effect, the head of their family. How does she feel about having this much responsibility? In what ways is she prepared for this change, and in what ways is it apparent that she is still a child herself? How does Dicey’s role within the family change as the children move in with their grandmother and get older?

2. James is considered “the smart one” in the family. How does this affect the way he fits in with the other Tillerman children? With the rest of the world? Are there times when he would be a more effective leader than Dicey?

3. Why does everybody think that Maybeth is mentally disabled, and why does her family disagree? What other gifts does she possess that make her an integral part of the Tillerman family? Why does she try so hard at school, even though she isn't very good at it? What do you think the future holds for Maybeth?

4. Sammy is still very young when their mother abandons them. How does this change the way that he deals with their family situation? Why does he find it so difficult to control his anger? Why do you think that Dicey likes to remember how happy he was as a baby?

5. Discuss Gram and the role that she plays in the Tillerman family. How does her past change the way she deals with the present? What qualities does she possess that make her particularly well suited to be the children’s guardian? Is her reputation for eccentricity well deserved?

6. The Tillerman children met many different people during the summer they spent traveling in search of a home. Who was most helpful to the children? Does the fact that these people were only in their lives for a short time make them any less important? Why do you think the Tillermans enjoy their time with the circus?

7. Bodies of water and boats both come up often in the Tillerman books. Find examples of these references. In what ways are they good metaphors for the Tillerman family? Why is Dicey, especially, drawn to the water?

8. What does it mean to the various characters to be part of a family? What obligations and responsibilities go along with this? Does it take a blood relation to be a family member?

9. In Seventeen Against the Dealer, Dicey thinks that Sammy “took his knocks standing up” and that Maybeth “endured failures like a patch of marsh grass.” What does Dicey mean by this? How do Dicey and James handle adversity? Does each child's method of dealing with trouble fit their personality?

10. Cisco believes the time to gamble is when you can’t afford to lose. Do the other characters agree with this philosophy? Can you think of a circumstance in which they followed this advice? Do you think that there is anything that Cisco can’t afford to lose?

11. The Tillerman family seems to have a legacy of poverty, mental illness, and failure. Do Dicey, James, Maybeth, and Sammy share in this legacy? How does each of them attempt to rise above this?

Activities and Research

1. Using a map, trace the route the children took in Homecoming. Can you find an alternate route they could have taken? Research bus and train routes from Bridgeport to Crisfield and determine if the children could have gotten closer to their destination with the money they had.

2. When their mother abandons them, the children are afraid they will be separated and put into foster care. Research the foster care system—when it was started, how it works, and if it is likely that the children would have been separated. Have a debate or mock trial to determine what will be done about the Tillerman children, with one side arguing that they should all stay with Gram and one side arguing that they should enter the foster care system.

3. Music plays an important role in the children’s lives, and they are particularly fond of folk music. Find recordings of some of the songs the children liked to sing and listen to them. Learn to sing or play on an instrument one of the songs. Perhaps you could even write a folk song about the Tillermans.

4. Dicey wants to support herself by building boats. Write a report on modern shipbuilding—what materials and techniques are used, do small shops like Dicey’s exist, etc. Design your own boat and build a model of it.

5. Maybeth needs special help from James and Dicey in order to advance in school, and she spends much of her time being tutored by her family members. Do you know a younger person who needs some special help with their schoolwork? Set aside an hour or two a week to tutor them.

6. There are many things Dicey doesn’t think of when she starts her own business, and they cause her trouble later on. Pretend that you are starting a business of your own. Create a business plan that includes information such as where the start-up money will come from, the steps you need to go through before starting, a list of all the materials you will need, etc. Discuss these business plans and see if other people can think of issues you forgot to address.

About the Author

Cynthia Voigt’s many honors include the Newbery Medal for Dicey’s Song, a Newbery Honor for A Solitary Blue, and, in 1995, the Margaret A. Edwards Award for excellence in young adult writing. In addition to her books in the award-winning Tillerman cycle, she is the author of four highly acclaimed books about the Kingdom: The Wings of a Falcon, On Fortune’s Wheel, Jackaroo, and Elske. Ms. Voigt lives in Deer Isle, Maine, where she no longer teaches English but misses it.

This guide has been provided by Simon & Schuster for classroom, library, and reading group use. It may be reproduced in its entirety or excerpted for these purposes.

About The Author

Photograph courtesy of the author

Cynthia Voigt won the Newbery Medal for Dicey’s Song, the Newbery Honor Award for A Solitary Blue, and the National Book Award Honor for Homecoming, all part of the beloved Tillerman Cycle. She is also the author of many other celebrated books for middle grade and teen readers, including Izzy, Willy-Nilly, and Jackaroo. She was awarded the Margaret A. Edwards Award in 1995 for her work in literature, and the Katahdin Award in 2004. She lives in Maine.

Product Details

  • Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers (July 10, 2012)
  • Length: 240 pages
  • ISBN13: 9781442450646
  • Ages: 12 - 99

Browse Related Books

Awards and Honors

  • School Library Journal Best Books of the Year
  • Booklist Editors' Choice

Resources and Downloads

High Resolution Images

More books from this author: Cynthia Voigt

More books in this series: The Tillerman Cycle