A father reflects on picking pumpkins at a farm or orchard in his youth, and recalls the image of his own father carving the pumpkins with a doctor’s precision. In the present, he takes his four-year-old son Nick to a parking lot to buy a pumpkin. He is tormented by the contrast between the “idyllic golden falls of [his] Maryland youth” and the grunginess of the world into which he has brought Nick. He is also haunted by thoughts of a recent miscarriage that had terminated his wife’s pregnancy at seventeen weeks, killing what could have been a daughter. In the parking lot, Nick's father's eyes land on an open-doored car containing a little boy about Nick’s age, and surmises that he is waiting for his own father. Nick begins to look for a pumpkin, generally more attracted to the less attractive specimens. Nick's father talks briefly with the cashier, then is distracted by the appearance of a tall man in a Raiders cap—the father of the boy in the car. The man strides over to the car, and the little boy hands him a small baggie; then the man leaves him alone again. Nick's father smiles at the little boy, they exchange a few words, and then the boy approaches Nick's father to continue their conversation. Nick approaches the duo with a tiny pumpkin in-hand, and the little boy—Andre, he reveals—describes the big pumpkin he has at home. Nick begins to cry that he doesn’t want a big pumpkin, and that he doesn’t want his father to cut his pumpkin with a knife. Andre tries to explain to Nick that the pumpkin isn’t alive, and Nick's father makes a series of assumptions about Andre that he acknowledges are racialized: namely, that his father is a drug-dealer, and that Andre’s interest in Nick and his pumpkin indicates that he’s lying about having a pumpkin of his own at home. Nick tells his father that he wants to name the pumpkin Kate—which is the name that his parents had been using for their unborn baby. Just then, Andre’s father returns. Andre asks for a pumpkin, but his father doesn’t even bother to say no. As Andre gets back in the car, Nick's father tells Andre's father that Andre is a nice boy. Andre and his father drive off, and Nick's father makes eye contact with Andre one final time. He sees reproach in Andre's eyes that mirrors the reproach he saw in Nick’s eyes while Nick was once strapped to a table for a medical procedure. Nick's father caves and tells Nick he can get the small pumpkin and call it Kate, but Nick decides to get a bigger one. He says Kate can have the small one “because she didn’t get to have a pumpkin, since she didn’t get to ever be alive”. He goes off to look for another pumpkin.