An older man visits the family of his late colleague Jacob Foxx Greer after his biography is published by a young writer named Wright Kemzell. Though the man sits and talks with Jacob's daughter Penny, her mother, the widowed Clemmie, is not home. He informs Penny that he and his sister Doris are staying at a nearby hotel, since they are only there visiting, on vacation in South Florida, and asks if she and her mother would join them for dinner before they leave. At the hotel, the man and his sister discuss Jacob's biography, whose author, Kemzell, they have little respect for. The biography about Jacob Greer, the successful author, features the man briefly as an old friend who shared his office and occasionally looked after his daughter, but the book also mentions Jacob's struggle with addiction. Doris is relieved that she does not appear in the book, as she and Jacob had a child when she was nineteen years old and had tried, it seems successfully, to cover it up.

That night, Clemmie and Penny join the man and his sister for dinner and attend a magic show hosted by the hotel. Doris volunteers to be part of the magician's trick, and the crowd watches as he produces birds and fire from a plastic Hula-Hoop and transforms her shawl into a spherical bowl. After dinner, Clemmie, now old and frail, seems sad and forgetful as she thanks her hosts for dinner and heads home with her daughter.