Content Warning: This text includes references to death of a child, implied parental abuse and neglect, and separation of a foster child from their preferred family.

The novella opens after a Sunday Mass as the unnamed narrator’s father drives her to Wexford County where her mother’s relatives live. They pass a village in which the father gambled away one of the family’s cows. The first-person narration reveals the girl’s thoughts as she watches the summer sky and imagines several versions of her future life at the Kinsellas’ farm. Once they arrive, the narrator notices her reflection in the gleaming windows of the house looking “wild as a tinker’s child” (5). The farm’s hound dog barks, and John Kinsella (referred to as Kinsella) comes outside. Kinsella and the girl’s Da discuss the lack of rain and farming costs while Edna Kinsella, referred to by the narrator as the woman, emerges to embrace her visitor. Edna notes that she hasn’t seen the girl since she was a baby, but the conversation stalls as the narrator notices an unusual wind blowing.

The woman takes the narrator into a welcoming kitchen, takes a rhubarb tart out of the oven, and asks after the child’s mother, Mary, who is very pregnant.