Dee finds Fellis with his hair frozen into a swamp and cuts off Fellis's braid to free him.

David and his mother move to the Penobscot reservation after his parents' divorce.

Frick is called to dispose of a mysterious jar found in the family's new home and moves in with them.

Paige reveals she is pregnant, causing a heated conflict with her mother.

Paige miscarries, and the family drives to a remote location to perform a burial ceremony for the fetus.

Dee and Fellis get into a violent street fight with Meekew after he refuses to sell them drugs.

David's mother goes missing and is found at Frick's remote cabin, where she discovers photographs of a young girl.

David's mother reveals she cannot have more children because a tumorous twin spread through her body at David's birth.

David's grandmother, suffering from dementia, mistakes David for her dead brother and forces him to smoke many cigarettes.

David's mother suffers a severe seizure at the crisis stabilization unit and temporarily cannot recognize her own son.

Dee breaks into his grandmother's house while she is at the nursing home to steal money for drugs.

Dee calls his grandmother after sleeping off drugs by the river and learns that she has died.

Fellis robs the tribal museum and is later arrested by police while attempting to flee to Boston.

Frick, in a drug-altered state, attempts to rape Paige; she fights him off by beating him with a fireplace poker.

Paige's baby Bedogi dies while in David's care, and the family gathers to perform a burial ceremony.

The collection opens with Dee rescuing Fellis from a frozen swamp and then follows David as a child moving onto the reservation with his mother. The early stories track the family's growing pains under Frick's roof, including Paige's miscarriage and the buried secrets between David's mother and Frick. As David becomes Dee, his bond with Fellis deepens into shared addiction, leading to escalating crimes and his grandmother's death. The middle stories show Dee drifting further from family through drug dependency, culminating in Fellis's arrest and Dee's methadone recovery. The collection closes by returning to David's youth, where Frick's violence against Paige and the death of Paige's baby Bedogi mark the family's most devastating losses.

The headline events of David and Dee's life on the Penobscot reservation.

Dee returns to Rab and buys marijuana after Fellis gives him money from his pocket.

Paige is mysteriously bitten by an invisible presence at night, frightening everyone in the household.

Dee goes back to the site of the fight the next morning and finds that Meekew has already disappeared.

Fellis's dropping out of college is exposed during a bitter fight between Fellis and his mother Beth.

Dee punches Fellis in the face and breaks his nose after Fellis verbally abuses his mother.

Frick and David's mother have a heated argument over a headstone that Frick wants to destroy.

A dead turtle is discovered rotting inside David's mother's closet, spreading a foul smell through the house.

David visits his grandmother at her home, refills her wood box, and she makes him dinner.

Tribal police and EMTs bring David's distraught grandmother to his house late at night.

David throws rocks at white men outside a bar after one of them calls him a racial slur, breaking the bar's window.

A newspaper article falsely reports that the boys had approached the white men first and caused the confrontation.

David's mother leaves a pack of cigarettes on his dresser with a note reading 'Make them last.'

Dee and Fellis wake up inside a silo surrounded by empty beer cans with no memory of the night before.

Dee covers himself in his grandmother's clothing to escape unrecognized when his own mother enters the room.

Ralph Nelson sits with Dee in the sweat lodge and sings a song Dee doesn't recognize but suspects is traditional.

Behind the collection's major turning points are smaller scenes that reveal how the characters live, struggle, and hold each other together. From Dee quietly buying drugs after freeing Fellis to domestic arguments over headstones and pawnshop silver, these events show the texture of life on the reservation beneath the crises. The stories of David's adolescence are filled with the casual violence of boys' games, racist confrontations at bars, and a mother's quiet resignation to what she cannot prevent. As Dee grows older, his estrangement from family deepens through small, telling gestures—waking in a silo with no memory, hiding in a dead woman's closet. The pool closes with a moment of unexpected grace, as Ralph Nelson sings a traditional song that Dee doesn't recognize but cannot stop listening to.

The quieter but significant scenes that fill out daily life on the reservation.

Fellis insists his cut braid must be burned per tradition, but Dee leaves it frozen in the ice and goes to buy marijuana.

David gives Frick his toy container to use as a vessel for burying Paige's miscarried fetus.

Fellis casually admits to Dee that Meekew never had a weapon during the fight the night before.

Frick grabs David's mother by the wrist when she confronts him about the photographs found at his cabin.

Frick reveals that the girl in his cabin photographs is his daughter Corinne, who was killed in a car accident.

Dee and Fellis accidentally deliver the wrong prescription medication to Fellis's aunt, sending her into distress.

Dee calls Tabitha back but cuts off the phone call before she can say what she needs to say.

David watches a documentary about Pioneer 10 being abandoned by NASA in deep space, which deeply frightens him.

David's grandmother calms only when she sees David is alive, believing she has not driven her brother to drown.

David calls his father, receives wired money, and then steals a pack of cigarettes from his mother before heading out.

Dee opens his grandmother's safe at home and finds an envelope bearing his name containing $4,700.

Fellis physically assaults Daryl after learning that Daryl had propositioned Fellis's young cousin Alice.

Ralph Nelson shields Dee from approaching tribal police by declaring that his sweat lodge had just been blessed.

David and his friends discover that the creature they have been hunting in the forest is actually Paige crawling while high.

Paige refuses to name her newborn baby, so Frick and David give the child the name Bedogi, meaning thunder.

This pool traces the quiet pivots and sudden disclosures that define the characters' inner lives. From Dee's first choice to leave behind cultural tradition to buy marijuana, to Fellis's casual confession that his lie put Dee at legal risk, these moments reveal how loyalty, identity, and self-destruction are intertwined. The middle of the collection is shaped by Frick's violent secrets, Dee's paralysis in ending a relationship that doesn't fit, and a grandmother whose dementia becomes an unexpected door into family history. Toward the collection's end, the revelations grow darker—money meant for a future is spent on drugs, a sweat lodge becomes a refuge, and a baby's arrival without a name signals a family already bracing for loss. Each event marks a point of no return for one or more characters.

The key decisions, confessions, and discoveries that shift the story's direction.