During the pandemic, the man’s wife throws away a lot of their old things in order to clean. To him, each old thing she throws away is a loss of a memory associated with them.

The man thinks back to high school. In his senior year, he wins an award given to the most promising high school senior each year. The award is conferred by a family who owns a restaurant and a theater space, both mediocre. He considers high school a second home, though eventually all of his belongings from that time—like his awards—would go into a trunk in an attic. He then meets the girl who would later become his wife. With divorced parents, she lives a difficult life between them and bears the responsibility of taking care of her six siblings. He asks her out to go bowling, and they stay together henceforth. Thinking back on her lives, he considers his to have been much easier than hers.

As he leaves for college, he and his girlfriend make a clean break, waiting for how things will really turn out as time goes on. He studies math in college, though he sometimes acts in the theater space owned by the family who awarded him a prize. There, he acts alongside the prize-conferring family’s daughter who is much older than him. Later, during the closing night of a show, she has intercourse with him in the woman’s bathroom.

Through college, the man switches to studying English and gets accredited to be a teacher. He returns back to his hometown and gets hired as a teacher at his high school. Since then, she has lost touch with his ex-girlfriend—whom no one knows the whereabouts of—and has drifted away from the theater space too. He puts all of his time and effort into teaching, slowly but surely building a life for himself.

Now, the man’s wife wants to throw out an electric grill. He considers it very sentimental.

The man recalls how the electric grill meant so much for his first marriage. Back then, at church, he meets a woman who would become his first wife. She works for her father’s advertising firm and makes more money than he does as a teacher. They have a wedding in Carmel and have a quick honeymoon in Cabo. Irresponsibly, she gets pregnant twice, to which she blames him for his carelessness, though she proceeds with both pregnancies anyway. Together, they work their respective jobs and take care of their two boys, though his wife is noticeably more absent due to her career’s demands.

One day, the man is at home with his two kids. He watches television while an electric grill in the kitchen cooks burgers. The younger boy then chokes on a toy piece. After the older boy tells him, the man tries to push the toy piece out of his throat, after which he tries tweezers, but soon enough, smoke billows out the kitchen, which is from the electric grill he had running with burgers. Although he calls the fire department in time, his wife comes home to the whole debacle, upset at both the choking incident and the burning incident. He says that she can no longer stand their life together and tells him to leave.

The man moves all of his things into a motel for the time being, and soon enough, his ex-wife meets a plumber at church and moves to Arizona with him, taking their children too. As the two boys grow up, they have a hazy memory of him and don’t really see him as a father. Now alone, the man returns to the bowling alleys of his youth to pass the time alongside teaching. One day, he suffers an injury in his shoulder and goes to the hospital to check it out.

At the hospital, he sees his girlfriend from high school, who disappeared long ago to get her GED and go to community college to get medical credentials. They catch up while she treats him, after which they continue to stay in touch and even go out to bowling again, as the girlfriend has gone bowling numerous times in the years that passed while they were apart. After a few weeks, they get married, and the now-wife switches jobs to be a nurse at his high school.

Now, living together through the pandemic, the wife asks the man for help with clearing out the attic, full of things from their pasts, including the electric grill which caused his first marriage to fall apart in the first place. He’s okay with tossing out the electric grill once and for all—despite his past reservations with it—but wants to keep his bowling ball for longer. She obliges, though she says again that nothing will last forever in their house.