A man is in a failing marriage to Ann, with two children between them. His job often requires that he travel to Cleveland and Cincinnati, though his home is in Detroit. While on one of these work-related trips, he begins an affair with a woman named Kathleen who is twenty years his junior. They engage in sexual activities, though she never lets him have sex with her because he doesn't have protection and because she actually likes him. She tells him that she is also married, but that her husband has moved out of her house and invites him to come stay with her. They spend several days together, every night gradually getting closer to penetrative sex. He believes he's falling in love with Kathleen and asks her to go to Mexico with him, though she declines. One night, Kathleen tells him about her father who killed himself recently. Her mother, who had a mental illness, would become immobile for days at a time when some interaction displeased her. Both her parents were very religious and, at the time, she and her husband had been living with them. When her mother found out that they'd lived together for almost a year before getting married, she reacted irrationally. Soon after, the mother would call the father at work, telling him that she had to take herself and her two youngest daughters away from him in order to fix the situation. Before the police arrived, Kathleen's mother and two younger sisters were dead, and within weeks, so was her father. After he is told Kathleen's story, even though he has condoms now, he can't keep his erection for her, thinking about her family, unable to imagine her solely as a sex object. He goes down to Mexico and receives a letter from Kathleen that he doesn't finish.