Elizabeth and her son Martin arrive at their rented room in Denver, Colorado, the newest location her husband Paul is in military training. At first absorbed in the tasks of setting up house, Elizabeth soon begins sleeping restlessly, paranoid at Martin's every cough. She found solace in the assured knowledge of her husband Paul radiant love.

In the mornings Elizbeth and Martin do the shopping, in the afternoons they go to the park. At night she beginsa reading ladies' magazines to distract herself, Mrs. Moran's radio Gospel Hour chattering through the walls and commanding listeners to suffer. Other nights she turns to old memories and fabricated dreams. She thinks of flowers, dinner smells, Martin playing peacefully, the six o'clock train that brought her father home.

She lived for Sundays, when her husband comes home and the three of them spend twelve fleeting hours together. Her husband speaks constantly of the home he would build them, a design mapped out in his head. The season passes into fall. Elizabeth comes across the upstairs neighbor Mrs. Cole in the park holding her daughter's baby. She spits on the name of the child's father, drunk and destitute, while Martin stands by uncomprehendingly. Martin catches a cold which keeps her up at night. The landlady comes to her, showing her old poems and weeping, asking 'What's to become of me?'. Eventually her daughter takes her away and the house goes up for sale.

One night Elizabeth comes in and found a drunk man in the hallway. She proceeds upstairs, disturbed. When she brings food to Mrs. Cole and her daughter the next night, they say it was the good-for-nothing father of her baby. She's lucky, they tell Elizabeth. Elizabeth doesn't feel that way. When she had stopped expecting it, Paul called to say he'd been deployed. Elizabeth went mechanically through the motions of moving out. Mrs. Cole bids them goodbye, and the two are gone.