The narrator is an unnamed boy sitting inside his hut with Father. He watches the shadows on the wall grow and change shape as the sun sets. The next day, Father will travel 50 miles by bicycle to retrieve his wife, the narrator’s stepmother, who has run away for the fourth time. The narrator resents his father for driving away his biological mother. As he examines Father’s gray stubble, he is reminded of a pair of dove nestlings that died after their mother was shot.

The narrator recalls the quarrel that ended his parents’ marriage for good. Following the fight, after both Father and Mother stormed out of the house, the narrator fell asleep with the door open on a cold night. He developed a fever, and Mother returned to nurse him back to health. Yet by the time the fever broke, Mother was gone, and Father already had a new wife. Unhappy with his new partner, Father tries to repair his relationship with the narrator. The narrator says, “But he was too late. He had taught me silence and in that long journey between mother’s time and this other woman’s, I had given myself to the shadows” (5).