In a small town in Toronto, a group of young boys finds the body of the town optometrist, Mr. Willens, drowned in the river inside his submerged car. The boys—Cece, Bud, and Jimmy—go home to their families and eat dinner without saying anything about the dead body for various reasons. Cece has an abusive father who would take any news poorly. Jimmy—whose father is crippled and whose family lives tightly-packed but ever-polite with his grandmother, who has generously taken in them and others—might have met some disapproval. Bud, whose sisters annoy him, would have asked if he were crazy and twisted his finding the dead body into some kind of character flaw.

The next day, the boys meet up and report to each other that they didn't say anything. They resolve to go to the police office and tell. They see Mrs. Willens in her yard and she offers them cuttings from her azalea bush, acting as if nothing is wrong—they don't know whether or not she knows about Mr. Willens's death. One of Bud's sisters and her friend ride by on bikes and tease them about holding the flowers.

The boys go to see Colonel Box and tell him about the death; however, at the last moment, Cece blurts out an insult that his fly is down instead and the boys run off. Bud tells his mother that day, who tells the police. The boys become known in the town by the nickname Deadman.

Enid is a home nurse caring for a woman named Mrs. Quinn, who's kidneys are failing and who is tremendously sickly and near death. Enid became a home nurse after promising her father—who thought nursing would make her "coarse" and sexually-spoiled—that she would never work in a hospital on his deathbed. Later, she became a home nurse, telling herself she wasn't breaking her promise. Enid lives with her mother next to Mr. Willens and used to play bridge with him, his wife, and her mother, and he would often bring her flowers or chocolates.

Enid observes Mrs. Quinn's bitterness in the decline of her health toward her family members and everyone healthy around her. Enid is familiar with this phenomena as a nurse but, for the first time, comes to find the sickly body of Mrs. Quinn repulsive. Mrs. Quinn's husband, Rupert, is a man who Enid and her friends used to make fun of in high school, which she now feels tremendously guilty about. Rupert often comes home too late to see Mrs. Quinn, after she's asleep. Enid begins to have sex dreams with "utterly forbidden or unthinkable partners"—babies, patients, her own mother.

One day, Rupert walks in on Mr. Willens, the optometrist, assaulting his wife in the guise of treating her. He beats Mr. Willens to death. Mrs. Quinn and Mr. Willens make a plan to dispose of the body—they'll leave him in his car, submerged in the river, and it will look like he drove in himself in the dark. The town's papers run the story they hoped; however, Mrs. Quinn, before dying shortly thereafter, tells Enid Mr. Willens was at their house, and Enid pieces together the true story.

After Mrs. Quinn's death, Enid asks Rupert to take her out in his rowboat to take a picture. She plans to then tell him in the middle of the river that she can't swim, and ask him the truth of what happened to Mr. Willens—putting him in a position where he can drown her if he choses. She can't live with the idea of knowing something wrong and not doing anything about it—but what she wants is for him to turn himself in, for his own sake, so he can live with himself. She has a romantic fantasy where she regularly visits him in prison, after he turns himself in.

Enid wonders if she could have made up her theory that Rupert killed Mr. Willens. She reflects on lies—she thinks about how as a child she told her mother about seeing her father have an affair with another woman, whose breasts she described as ice cream cones. When her mother asked and Enid said they were unlike her mother's breasts—more like ice cream cones—her mother told her it was a dream. It was only much later that she reasoned her mother must be right—she must have unwittingly told a lie.

Enid and Rupert enter Mrs. Quinn's room and Enid starts to cry. They walk out to the rowboat.