A woman named Joyce teaches music and lives with her husband, Jon, a carpenter. Her husband gets a new apprentice, a woman named Edie, who is a recovering alcoholic covered in tattoos. Jon falls in love with Edie and leaves Joyce. Later, Joyce tries very hard to put on the best school concert ever, since Edie's child is in the concert and she thus assumes that Edie and Jon will attend the concert; they do not. Later, Joyce is in a new marriage, she hosts a party where a strange woman wearing a frilly dress attends. Joyce dislikes this woman, but decides to purchase the woman's book when she sees it in the bookstore. She hears that the woman will have a signing, but does not want to attend. She begins to read the book, and realizes that it is the story of her divorce from Edie's child's perspective. The author is Edie's child. Joyce gets a whole new perspective on her interactions with the child, and how she always had just thought of her as Edie's child rather than Christine. She feels a bit of shame at this, but then reads that Christie still loved her despite it, and realized that she loved Christie as well.