In between rows of corn stocks, fourteen-year-old Harmon drinks whiskey and watches as her dad’s truck comes up the drive to their clapboard house in Dill City, Oklahoma. Next week, she is going to Texas to get married where she doesn’t need parental approval. Her dad asks her to go in the cellar but she refuses because that’s where her dead mother’s old things are. 

She tells her dad that Jimmy, the twenty-year-old man she wants to marry, says there aren’t tornados in Dallas. Jimmy is a mechanic in the Air Force who is being transferred soon back to Dallas. Six days ago, he called to tell her he’d pick her up in a week and find a place for them to rent after they married, but he hasn’t called since. Her Dad ignores the mention of Jimmy and asks her to bring the chickens inside their coop so they don’t get blown away. 

When they get to the chicken house, the storm starts up and the lights go out in the house. Harmon finds candles underneath the sink and her dad fills up a jug with water. Suddenly, they hear the sound of someone cursing from upstairs. They find two boys in the bathroom from the town across the highway. The older boy aims a gun at her father who tells him it’s not even loaded and tells them to go down to the cellar. 

Down in the cellar, Harmon watches her father set up the candles and looks at his tattoos, an eagle and a dagger, remnants from his time working on an onion farm in California. This is a time period he doesn’t like to talk about and she knows nothing about what happened there, other than the fact that he refuses to eat onions now. 

She thinks about having sex with Jimmy and how after he would push her away and turn on the TV or drive her home. She remembers seeing her mother naked when they changed in the same room at her grandma’s house and feels ashamed. She had been born with a twin brother who died as a baby, and she figured this loss was why her mother dedicated so much time to raising and paying attention to her.  

Her dad asks the two boys what they think of her marrying a 20-year-old man and then asks them what they were doing in his house. At first, they lie and say they wanted to steal his gun to shoot turkeys but they then admit that they were looking for jewelry to sell in the city. Then, her father asks her if she thinks Dallas is a good place to live. She replies that she thinks it will be better there. When he asks her if she thinks it’s what God intended, and she says that she thinks God loves other people more than her. 

One of the boys asks Harmon’s father how his wife died, and he says it was an accident. Harmon remembers how her mother had asked her to drive that day and they had gotten into a big wreck that sent her mother through the windshield. Her dad breaks the silence by telling Harmon he won’t allow her to marry Jimmy. She admits she knows he won’t be good to her, but it doesn’t change her plans to marry him. 

They had met in a drugstore in Cordell two months after her mother’s funeral, and he had invited her to a rodeo the following weekend, which she had accepted. The cellar grows colder and she begins to shiver. She looks through some of her mother’s things in the cellar and, to her surprise, comes across a bag of onions. She shows her Dad who looks sad for a moment before bursting out in uncontrollable laughter. 

When the storm subsides, they leave the cellar and find the storm left no damage to their property. He tells the boys to run home before he calls their father and they drive off. As their truck leaves, Jimmy’s is coming down the driveway, and Harmon’s stomach turns. When Jimmy gets out, he tells her he’s been trying to call and she notices that his face doesn’t look the same as she remembered.