Soon Tassie finds herself embroiled in the Brink family's attempts to adopt a biracial child who eventually goes by the name "Emmie".

Having failed to succeed academically and be accepted to a four-year college, Robert enlists in the United States Army and attends boot camp at Fort Bliss.

Tassie spends a medical leave of absence from school recovering at her parents' small farm, but she returns to college in November of the next academic year.

Tassie addresses the reader directly, saying she declined to meet him even for a cup of coffee[7] and the novel ends on the words, "That much I learned in college.

Michael Gorra writes that it refers to the child safety gates that people put at the top of staircases to keep children from toppling down the stairs.

[9] Michiko Kakutani, on the other hand, believes the book's title refers to a song Tassie wrote which includes the lyric "I’d climb up that staircase/past lions and bears,/but it’s locked/at the foot of the stairs.

The gate is slightly off its hinges, and Tassie notes mentally "it should have communicated itself as something else: someone’s ill-disguised decrepitude, items not cared for properly but fixed repeatedly in a make-do fashion, needful things having gotten away from their caregiver.

"[11] Since 1984, Lorrie Moore has been teaching literature and writing at the University of Wisconsin at Madison where she holds the Delmore Schwartz Professorship in the Humanities.

NYT reviewer Michiko Kakutani praised Moore's development of the main character and, in particular, the novelist's exploration of "the limitations and insufficiencies of love, and the loneliness that haunts even the most doting of families.

"[20] London Sunday Times reviewer Sophie Harrison heaped accolades on the novel, for the most part, finding it "unflaggingly tender and smart."

"[17] Bookmarks Magazine says Moore's writing “occasionally suffers from its own excess” while less than believable characters and plotting are accompanied by “an overabundance of flat jokes and too-clever puns” (quoted on Amazon.com).

[1] The Toronto Sun review notes that the novel captures post–September 11, 2001 anxiety: "It takes place in a post 9/11 American world against which anger and paranoia, race and religion vie with the demands of everyday life.