A woman drives with to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, hours from where she lives, with her seven-year-old son Ike. She is a single mother who has recently been orphaned after the passing of her elderly mother. She is going to Ted's Roadside Zoo to find the parrot named Carnie that had been her mother's pet for thirty years. She hopes that the parrot will speak with the same intonations and voice that her mother did, and that she will be able to hear her mother's voice one last time. Back home, the woman attempts to sell her house and move out of the South to Connecticut to find better schools for Ike. Her house has been on the market for over two years, but it is impossible to sell because of a cricket infestation in the basement. Carnie had never lived in her home because, though her mother loved the parrot and the parrot loved her mother, Carnie hated the woman, and she felt that she could not have a mean bird around her child. Her child is already small and sensitive, and she fulfills all "housewifely" duties alone, from washing the dishes to oil changes, since Ike's father turned out to be a married man who did not want to be involved in his son's life. When the woman arrives at Ted's Roadside Zoo, Carnie is among the malnourished and mistreated animals. He looks withered and old. The woman and Ike do dances and sing for the bird in hopes of a response, but Carnie refuses to speak. They leave the zoo, but the woman cannot leave without a piece of her mother. She remembers the fights she and her mother had at the end of her life, when her mother had to move to a nursing home and give Carnie away, unable to care for herself anymore. Desperate to find some trace of her mother, the woman decides to go to her childhood home. There, she takes down a valance and rips off wallpaper, which she takes home and places in her own house. When she is back home, the realtor arrives to give a tour of the house. He tells the woman to take down the dusty valance and dirty wallpaper, but she refuses. When a couple arrives for a tour of the house, Ike comes up from the basement holding a trap full of dead crickets, to the couple's disgust. The woman thinks about how, when she went to help her mom pack up her belongings before she moved to the nursing home, her mother had pretended not to care about memories or sentimentality. Though the woman had believed that her mother truly did not care, she now knows that all humans are full of love, care, and a need for connection to the past.