Grace, an old woman, visits the small town where she worked as a waitress at an inn over 40 years ago, at age 20. That summer, she had gotten to know the Traverses: a family consisting of Mr. Travers, Mrs. Travers, Neil (Mrs. Travers' son from her first marriage), Gretchen (their daughter), and Maury (their 21-year-old son, a college senior). One day, the family was at the inn's restaurant and Maury asked out Grace. She agreed, and they began dating. Grace, who had always loved learning but been unable to afford college, loved the family's intellectual word games they played together. She especially loved Mrs. Travers, who would let her read anything from their library. Mrs. Travers had read all the books too--of Anna Karenina, she observed how she emphasized with different characters at different ages, telling Grace: "Passion gets pushed behind the washtubs" as you get older. By the middle of the summer, Maury had begun to talk about marrying Grace as if she had already agreed. Grace still had barely told her aunt and uncle about him. She thought, "None of this seemed at all real to her, but then the idea of helping her uncle, of taking on the life of a chair-caner in the town and in the very house where she had grown up, had never seemed real, either." She wanted to have sex with Maury, but he wasn't willing to, thinking it was "his responsibility to protect her." One day, Mrs. Travers said to Grace that Maury was of good character but uncomplicated, while her eldest son, Neil, a doctor married to a mean woman, was "bright" and "deep." A while later, Mrs. Travers is unexpectedly hospitalized--Maury tells Grace she's in a psychiatric hospital for her nerves, and tells her that her first husband, Neil's father, killed himself. The entire family gathers for Thanksgiving. Mrs. Travers is back out from the hospital but Grace is dismayed by her changed appearance and new, frantic air. Grace cuts her foot playing with Gretchen's daughters. Then Neil arrives and treats the cut with his Doctor's kit. He insists on taking Grace to the hospital for a tetanus shot. Grace can smell alcohol on his breath and eventually learns he's an alcoholic. After the shot, a nurse tells them Maury is there to pick Grace up, but Neil tells her to lie and say they left, to which Grace agrees she doesn't want to go home yet. The drive away from town. Grace tells Neil she's not going to marry Maury. Neil takes her to a bar, where he gets a drink, and to a bootlegger's house. Neil flirts with her a little. They don't have sex but there is an intimate tension in the air and Grace keeps hoping they will. Neil teaches her how to drive. Then, in a conversation about his alcoholism, she realizes just how depressed he is. She thinks of intimacy: "She had thought that it was touch. Mouths, tongues, skin, bodies, banging bone on bone. Inflammation. Passion. But that wasn’t what she’d been working toward at all. She had seen deeper, deeper into him than she could ever have managed if they’d gone that way." Neil pulls over to sleep because he's become tired and when Grace can't wake him up she drives them all the way back to the inn where she works. They hug tightly as way of goodbye. Neil says he's wide awake and able to drive home. The next day, it turns out his car rammed into a bridge abutment, killing him instantly. It seems to have been deliberate, a suicide. Maury writes Grace: Just say he made you do it. Just say you didn’t want to go. _Grace responds: _I did want to go. A few days later, Mr. Travers comes to see Grace and gives her $1000, which she considers sending back or shredding but keeps, to start her life with.