The collection’s opening story takes place over the course of a single hot, dry summer day in rural Georgia. The third-person omniscient narrative opens with the unnamed female protagonist’s arrival at an annual blues festival. A widow whose husband’s lingering death has “leached her to the bone” (14), she is attending the festival alone.

Sunburned but still carrying the air of her dead husband’s sickroom, she returns specifically to see a musician from the previous year—a man named Edmun Lovingood. Having already purchased every one of his albums the year before, she knows every song and anticipates every emotional response the music evokes. She remains fixated on Lovingood alone for the entire performance. The performance, however, is not the main reason for her return. She has come for more than the music and prepared each minute detail for her true intent before leaving home: “the razor, the soap, the towels [...] laid out for him [...] the cut-up hen [...] in buttermilk. The beans [...] already snapped. The corn [...] to be shucked and pared” (15).

After the first performance, she follows Lovingood to the parking lot and waits for his fans to leave to plead her offer: “A shower [.