Tyler's plot explores the ways ordinary people react to disastrous events with quietly heroic behavior. When seventeen-year-old Ian Bedloe confronts his older brother Danny with his belief that the latter's wife, Lucy, is having an affair, Danny drives into a wall in an apparent suicide. Shortly after, Lucy dies of an overdose of sleeping pills, and responsibility for the care of the deceased couple's three children (two from their mother's previous marriage) falls to their grandparents. A profoundly guilty Ian, who has discovered his accusations were wrong, receives spiritual guidance from Reverend Emmett of the storefront Church of the Second Chance, and he decides to drop out of college to become a carpenter and help his ailing parents with the children, until he eventually becomes their primary caretaker, sacrificing his own freedom to fulfill what he perceives to be a lifelong moral obligation.
As the years pass and the three children mature, Ian continues to be torn between his sense of obligation to the children and the urge to have a "real life," but he increasingly finds solace and peace in participation at the church and becomes devoted to it, its homespun followers, and Rev. Emmett. Ian also develops into a dependable and loving father. The two oldest children (Agatha and Thomas) eventually leave home and form their own families, while the youngest (Daphne) stays home with Ian and the grandparents. When the grandmother has a heart attack, Agatha returns to find a disorganized house and tries to restore order. Efforts to organize the house with help from Daphne's friend, a young female professional "Clutter Counselor"(Rita), ultimately provide Ian with an opportunity for a new beginning as he and Rita become engaged to be married. "Moving back and forth among the points of view of various characters, Ms. Tyler traces two decades in the lives of the Bedloes, showing us the large and small events that shape family members' lives and the almost imperceptible ways in which feelings of familial love and obligation mutate over the years."[2]
