Taylor knows the story of his father killing someone. He did it on accident when he was twenty-eight-years-old while driving in El Paso. It was night, and it was foggy. His father was an army man driving home after a golf tournament. He did not see the taillights. After the crash, Taylor's father's golf clubs were strewn everywhere. He saw the car that he hit, which was in horrible shape, but at first he could not find the body of the driver. When he finally did, he found the man, who later turned out to be named Mr. Valentine, about fifty yards from his car, already dead. Taylor's father began laughing in horror.

Thirty years later, Taylor sits with his father drinking at his dad's home. His father tells stories about Taylor's mother, being in the military, and meeting famous people. At the end of the visit, he tells Taylor a story he's never told anyone—not his other children, not his wife, not his brother. He tells it as if the man in the story is named "X," but Taylor knows that X is his father. In the story, X meets his first wife, a French woman named Annette, at a golf tournament in San Antonio when he is thirty-one-years-old. A week later, the two are married. They move in together and begin living a normal life, not too different, Taylor notes, from the life he has with his wife Nadine. But X's wife suddenly dies. X cannot find a sense of grief within himself, only numbness. At the funeral service, when X and his family are progressing between the service and the burial, X continues to feel numb and instructs his driver to pull over. X gets out of the car, ignoring the shouts of his family and friends, and gets X ice cream.

Taylor goes home and tells Nadine about his father's first wife. Nadine asks what the moral is and how it ended, and Taylor knows but has trouble explaining. The moral, he tells her, is that everything is fragile. But he leaves out the part of the story where, after his father had finished telling the story and fell asleep, Taylor walked around X's house, looking at all of his things. He looked over his father while he was sleeping and listened to him snore, thinking about the stories his father has told him.