Phebe is a precocious 16-year-old college freshman in Ann Arbor dating John with the intention of marrying him. In June of 1965, on a ride home from college, Phebe gets into a car accident, leaving two people dead.  Phebe relates how difficult it is for her to drive and go to the store alone since the accident, recounting how she married John at sixteen and that it took her three years after to muster the strength to leave the house. Phebe then ruminates on her emotional and sexual stagnation with John which, in a jarring juxtaposition, recalls the memory of her at 14, giving her blind date a hand job. In a series of non sequitur reflections and nostalgia, Phebe narrates the experiences of her slowly failing, loveless marriage, and of a recent Tarot reading that evoked in her the passion to write a book.  Phebe then recounts a time she was walking through the bakery with her young daughter, Jenny, when she compulsively follows a woman dressed all in brown leather throughout the store and to her home. Phebe becomes enamored with this stranger and eventually leaves a chocolate cake at the woman’s door with a note reading: “For the Leather Lady from a Secret Admirer.” She also reflects on the memory of Jenny’s birth and John’s distaste for his mother-in-law’s post-delivery visit. Eventually, Phebe approaches the Leather Lady with a gift she had been knitting for her, an afghan. She soon discovers the Leather Lady is not a lady at all, but an amiable man named Andre. In her final memory, Phebe reflects on her disturbing adolescence: her father molesting her for years, making-out and sexually engaging with a boy nicknamed the Red Monkey while desperately hoping for her mom’s approval. She also notes that her mother was the one who helped take care of her after the car accident, and expresses how she wishes for her mother's affection. Phebe finally recalls the first time John got her pregnant and her father flew to Michigan to take her to Japan for an abortion. She concludes by thinking how her father must’ve thought the abortion to be a waste since she immediately married John and got pregnant a second time after coming back from Tokyo.