In the title story, an eight-year-old boy's life is transformed when his parents take in an adolescent drifter. She stays in the basement and works at his father's service station, and she is as tough and unreachable as the boy is sensitive and vulnerable. She curses, she lies, she fixes cars, and she eventually steals from the cash register and runs off with the middle-aged alcoholic mechanic. To the boy, though, she is mysterious and beautiful, straddling the grown-up world and his own.

Her presence inspires in him a constant longing that he can't articulate but that Hollingshead describes with unaffected sympathy. In other stories, a teenager glimpses, inexplicably, a naked man in his parents' house; a young writer attempts to confront an abusive nurse as he wrestles with his (drug-induced and natural) indecisiveness; a housewife is denounced for giving away a box of mysterious medical supplies intended for the Sudan and tries desperately to get it back.

Hollingshead's tales are populated by genuine, sincere people who feel out of step in their worlds, who struggle to maintain order, to connect with their families and peers, whose interactions are startling and comical, moving and pathetic.