Part 1, written in third person, presents Grover's perception of a childhood epiphany experienced months before the family moves from North Carolina to St. Louis.

In Part 3, also 30 years later, the older sister tells of an adventure at the Fair when she and the boy, youngsters in a strange place, sneak into downtown St. Louis and eat in a cheap restaurant.

In the sister's story we confront not only her long-sustained grief and guilt, but her vision of the incomprehensibility of life: "How is it," she asks, "that nothing turns out the way we thought it would be."

In Part 4, Eugene, the younger brother who has in the 30 intervening years become a famous writer, narrates his return to the house in St. Louis where the family had lived and the boy had died.

Instead, the writer-brother comes to see the limits of time and memory in recapturing the past, which marks a significant epiphany for him and a redirection of his work as writer.