Frank Money is twenty-four years old and a veteran of the Korean War. He receives a mysterious and anonymous note telling him to travel to Atlanta, Georgia, to rescue his sister Cee, urging him to come quickly because if he is tardy Cee might be dead before he gets there. Frank suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and lapses into "episodes" which leave him hospitalized in a mental institution at the beginning of the novel.
Frank and Cee grew up in a sleepy, middle-of-nowhere small town called Lotus, in the state of Georgia. They had a rough childhood; their grandfather's wife, Lenore, was verbally abusive and their hardworking parents were disconnected from them and later died. Lenore hated Cee the most because she was born after the family was evicted from their home in Texas, and thought her inauspicious birth augured future bad behavior.
Frank was always protective of Cee and took the brunt of any anger directed towards both of them; this was to shield her, which was well-meaning but ultimately damaging to Cee, who never learned how to defend herself emotionally or physically. Left to fend for herself, Cee's head was quickly turned by a man named Prince from Atlanta. They married and he took her back to his hometown with him, in a prized motor car they took from Lenore. The car was his pride and joy, far more than his wife, and after only a month of marriage he took the car and left Cee in Atlanta, a city where she knew nobody.
Cee worked as a kitchen hand, but it did not pay well. She found another job as a doctor's assistant, working for Dr. Beauregard Scott. He had a good name, but some things about him were disturbing, such as an over-interest in race science; his bookshelf groaned under the weight of books on the subject. She idolized the doctor and respected him enormously, but she had never had any experience in the medical field before and so did not see the signs of malpractice when they were in front of her. While living with the Scotts, she befriends their housekeeper, Sarah.
After escaping from the institution and getting help from kind pastors, Frank is able to start his trip to rescue Cee. He has a lot of time to think while he travels to Atlanta. He thinks of the woman he was with before this trip—Lily—and how it did not seem to be working out very well for either of them even though they loved each other. He remembers how he couldn't wait to leave Lotus. He remembers how excited he was about going to Korea, but he had not anticipated what seeing action would mean. The deaths of his friends and brothers-in-arms still haunt him. He cannot get the image out of his head of a guard shooting a Korean child in the face after she stroked his crotch.
Frank goes directly to Dr. Beauregard's house when he reaches Atlanta. He finds Cee in terrible shape: she is rail-thin, exhausted, and bleeding from between the legs. Dr. Beauregard was a eugenicist, sterilizing local women and conducting experiments on Cee. Sarah saw how sick Cee was getting, and wrote to her brother, who contacted Frank. Frank takes his sister out of the doctor's house, and then heads back to Lotus. He hasn't been there since he enlisted, but he knows that Miss Ethel Fordham is the only person who can help Cee in this condition. Miss Ethel and the neighborhood women can cure Cee but they won't let Frank see her at all whilst they are doing so.
The ladies nurse Cee back to health. She also learns how to be a little more street-smart than she was when she arrived; as well as healing her body, the women toughen up her mind and her spirit. Dr. Beauregard's experiments have rendered Cee infertile. She has visions all the time, and imagines children smiling up at her as if she is their mother. This causes something in Frank's memory to flip a switch and he is able to finally admit that the guard who shot the Korean girl in the face after she excited him sexually was actually him. This is likely one of the root causes of his post-traumatic stress disorder.
Frank and Cee have always been close, but having to look their truths in the eye brings them even closer. Frank does not feel so restless back in Lotus as he did when he was a teen. In fact, being back seems to comfort him. Cee and Frank want to do something to right the wrongs they feel they have done, and so they seek out the unmarked grave of a man from the town. Lotus had a lot of illicit "fight clubs" and this particular man was killed fighting to the death while men paid money to watch and bet on the winner. They take a quilt that Cee made, and wrap the bones of the dead man in it, creating a coffin for him before burying him once again.
