On the day that her husband dies, the wife writes a letter to the woman whom she and him knew since she was young. She thinks about how she first met her husband. Back then, she was a substitute teacher going out to the country on a Sunday drive with a science teacher at her school. They were going to see a man, an Air Force veteran who moved here after the war and became a hermit in his own maintained nature preserve. At the hermit’s house, the science teacher tries to convince him to open his nature preserve to a field trip at their school, but the hermit sternly tells them off. However, she, the substitute teacher, finds himself enamored with him and drives out again to his house later, all on her own. They tour the nature preserve together. There, the hermit briefly makes mention of the kids who live across the road from him. Inside of his house, they talk. Soon enough, she moves in with him. She assists him on his many jobs keeping up the nature preserve, including taxidermy, and eventually, they fall in love and grow intimate with each other.

Years later, the now wife (although a wife unofficially) tells the man and woman—who used to be the kids from across the street of the nature preserve—to come check out her husband’s house to make sure their water was turned off. Together, they drive through the countryside to get there, and they check out the house. The water is off, but instead of leaving, the woman rummages around some more and eventually starts to trash the place, all the while the man is sitting by himself, not looking. They drink liquor from the house and break bottles. Later, the woman calls the wife and tells her that the house has been vandalized.

Years before, when the man and woman were just a boy and a girl, the wife gets to know them well, asking them all sorts of questions after she just moved in with the hermit. The kids often go to the nature preserve to hang out, and their parents allow them to. Eventually, they come to spend every day of summer over at the hermit’s, with his new wife. They see him doing taxidermy. One day, the wife and the girl swim in the pond together. Soon enough, the husband comes in to play in the water with his wife. When the wife goes away, however, the husband makes an inappropriate attempt to grab the girl. Walking out of the pond, the girl thinks about what the husband is really like, how the wife may never get to really know that side of him: the bad hidden within the supposed good. She wishes that the wife was a different woman—the kind who could protect her and the boy from her husband.