Following her father's death, a woman moves into a cheap apartment complex and attends AA meetings while her mother channels her grief into constructing an elaborate enclosure for a desert tortoise she wishes to adopt.

The narrator and the other residents of her apartment complex refer to the place as "the shithole." The narrator finds communication with her mother difficult now. She goes to AA in part to hear stories, even if they're predictable. She befriends a widower just 10 years older than her whose husband was killed in a head-on car crash. The woman kept her husband's shoes around the house long after he died. She seems to think the narrator's mother's behavior is unhealthy and recommends the narrator take her mother out. The narrator thinks about how each stage of the grieving process is dangerous and how, for her mother, preparing for this turtle is the grieving process. She worries her mother won't get the turtle.

Then, it turns out her mother built the enclosure of the neighbors' property instead of her own, and she has to remove it.

The narrator moves out of "the shithole," keeps going to AA, and stops drinking.