The story opens in the area around Zenith, Pennsylvania, a rural community thirty-five miles from Philadelphia.

Retta Caldwell, her father and mother, and her younger brother live in a sturdy, two-story house with six bedrooms and three baths on an acreage that has been in the family for nearly three hundred years. Retta attends the county high school near Zenith where she drives each day in her yellow Volkswagen, a gift from her parents on her sixteenth birthday. The Caldwells live unusually ordered lives with dinner at seven in the dining room where the Gorham coffee service adorns the sideboard and Grandmother Caldwell's silver candlesticks lend grace to the table.

Change, however, comes to the Caldwells, as the six-lane highway, designed to carry traffic from Baltimore to Philadelphia, takes twenty acres of Caldwell land. After selling their homestead, they move across the United States to Thirty-Nine Palms, California...