A daughter tells the story of her parents' first meeting. Her father, Derek, asks her mother Mary to dance and let’s her do all of the talking. The daughter recalls her father telling her the story when she was little. She also recalls many different parts of her childhood. One major memory was her fear of the ventriloquist dummy on TV and her father trying to tell her not to be afraid of it. She was terrified of it because her father owned a toy warehouse that was filled with dummies. She remembers being a little girl and exploring the warehouse and seeing the eyes follow her as she walked past the dolls. She also remembers later, as a teenager, bringing up a debate with her father about miners’ rights and her mother being oddly quiet about the whole affair, even though the mother’s father was killed in a coal mine. Eventually her father dies in the burning of his warehouse, and his brother gets blamed for arson. However, it is actually the daughter who burns the warehouse to the ground to get rid of the dummies--- particularly one that looked exactly like her mother. Her mother, after the miners' debate, seems to be affected by a mental illness and begins to rave about a woman in the garage being cut up by her husband Derek. The daughter suspects that her father was cutting up women, including her mother, and putting them in parts of the ventriloquist dolls. She has one last memory of her uncles coming to rescue Mary from Derek. She defends her father, but he tries to get her to sit on his lap strangely. She feels that her father was always trying to control her like a dummy.