Content Warning: This section contains mentions of emotional abuse, anti-fat bias, and mental illness.

The epigraph reads, “Winchester Cathedral: An old-fashioned English shrub rose. […] Produces masses of large, loose-petalled white roses, occasionally with a touch of pink” (1).

Samantha “Sam” Montgomery returns to her family home in the suburbs of North Carolina, where her mother, Edith, lives in the house once owned by her grandmother. Sam, her brother, Brad, and Edith lived there with Gran Mae, Edith’s mother, for a year when Sam was 10 years old and moved in after Gran Mae’s death. Now, with both children grown and living in Arizona, Edith lives there alone. When Sam arrives, a vulture sits on the mailbox in front of the house, and she thinks that it is an obvious bad omen. Sam reflects on the neighborhood, a subdivision of modern, “cookie-cutter” houses surrounded by rural cow pastures and wooded lots. Across the street from her mother’s house lives Mr. Pressley, who has appointed himself “a one-man neighborhood watch” (5). With the vulture watching, Edith welcomes Sam home and assures her the vulture is harmless.

Sam is archaeoentomologist, working with