The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat

In the small city of Plainview, Indiana, three African American women have been inseparable friends since their teenage years in the 1960s. Odette Henry, Clarice Baker, and Barbara Jean Maxberry, nicknamed "the Supremes" by Little Earl McIntyre, the restaurant owner's son, gather every Sunday at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat buffet with their husbands. The novel follows them through a turbulent year of loss, illness, and reckoning, while flashbacks trace the origins of their bond and the secrets each woman carries.

Odette, the narrator of much of the story, was born in a sycamore tree after her pregnant mother, Dora Jackson, followed a local witch's instructions and climbed into its branches to sing a hymn. Local superstition held that a child born off the ground would grow up fearless, and Odette has spent her life embodying this legend. One July morning, she wakes from a hot flash and finds Mama, who died six years earlier, sitting in her kitchen. Mama mentions spending the evening with Big Earl McIntyre and his first wife, Thelma. Since Thelma has been dead for decades, Odette suspects Big Earl has also died. This revelation is the first sign of Odette's ability to see and speak with ghosts, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Mama's longtime ghostly companion, who has a talent for sensing impending death.

Big Earl's death is confirmed that Sunday when his second wife, Minnie, a self-styled fortune-teller, announces he died while saying his prayers the previous night. At the funeral dinner, Barbara Jean's husband, Lester Maxberry, a wealthy landscaper, is electrocuted while fixing a light in Minnie's fountain and dies. Odette sees Lester's ghost immediately join the company of spirits.

The women's histories unfold through interwoven flashbacks. Clarice, the first Black child born at Plainview's University Hospital, was raised by her perfectionist mother, Beatrice, to be a model of propriety. A gifted pianist, Clarice gave up her musical ambitions to marry Richmond Baker, a handsome former football star. She struck a deal to tolerate his affairs as long as he remained discreet, echoing her own mother's arrangement with her philandering father.

Barbara Jean was born on the davenport, or sofa, of a local woman named Miss Carmel Handy after her mother, Loretta Perdue, went into labor while fleeing angry ex-lovers. Barbara Jean grew up in poverty under the watch of Vondell, Loretta's menacing boyfriend. The Supremes' friendship was forged in the summer of 1967, when Odette's mother sent Odette and Clarice to deliver food to Barbara Jean on the day of Loretta's funeral. Odette recognized Vondell's predatory behavior and insisted Barbara Jean come with them. That evening at the All-You-Can-Eat, Big Earl seated the three girls at the coveted window table for the first time. Months later, when Vondell returned and physically restrained Barbara Jean, Odette asked Clarice to unzip her costume dress so she would not get blood on it, raised her fists, and bluffed the much larger man into retreating. Big Earl and his wife, Thelma, then took Barbara Jean into their home, giving her a family for the first time.

At the restaurant, Barbara Jean fell in love with Ray "Chick" Carlson, a handsome white teenager hired as a busboy. Chick's brother, Desmond, was a violent racist who terrorized Black residents along Wall Road. Despite this danger, Barbara Jean and Chick began a secret romance, sharing their histories of abuse and becoming lovers. When Lester, twenty-five years her senior, proposed marriage offering wealth and security, Barbara Jean agonized. Clarice urged her to accept; Odette quietly noted that Barbara Jean loved Chick. After Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in April 1968 set their imagined escape cities ablaze, Barbara Jean told Chick she would marry Lester. She then discovered she was pregnant with Chick's child, but when she raced to the restaurant to tell him, he had vanished. Searching desperately, she went to Desmond's property, where Desmond assaulted her. She fought him off and fled on foot until Lester found her on a dark road in his blue Cadillac. She confessed everything, expecting him to withdraw his proposal. Instead, Lester placed his hand on her stomach and swore to do right by her and the baby. They married the day after graduation.

Barbara Jean and Lester's son, Adam, was killed at age eight when Desmond struck him with his truck on Wall Road. On the night of the funeral, Barbara Jean asked Chick to kill Desmond. She found feathers from Chick's birds at the death scene the next day and spent nearly three decades believing she had made him commit murder.

In the novel's present, Odette is diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system, and begins chemotherapy. Her perceptive husband, James Henry, a state police officer, insists they face treatment together. Clarice responds by managing every detail of Odette's care, while Barbara Jean receives the news in near-silence.

Clarice's marriage reaches its breaking point. After witnessing James tenderly trying to style Odette's thinning hair, Clarice realizes she has never known that kind of devotion. She tells Richmond she can no longer live with him and moves into Odette's parents' old house in the neighboring town of Leaning Tree, where she rediscovers her passion for piano. Richmond eventually brings her a letter from Wendell Albertson, the record producer who wanted to record her Beethoven sonatas decades earlier, having secretly sent Albertson her old recital recordings. Moved by this gesture, Clarice invites Richmond to stay the night but refuses to move home. They begin an arrangement in which Richmond is her lover but no longer her live-in husband.

Barbara Jean's drinking worsens after Lester's death. Odette confronts her after Barbara Jean arrives drunk and disheveled at the All-You-Can-Eat, threatening to end their friendship unless Barbara Jean attends Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Barbara Jean begins meetings and acquires a sponsor, Carlo, a blunt speech therapist who forces her to confront her guilt over Desmond's death.

Chick has returned to Plainview to run a raptor rehabilitation project at the university. An awkward reunion at Odette's chemotherapy session rekindles old feelings. Meanwhile, Clarice's cousin Veronica enlists Clarice to plan her daughter Sharon's wedding to Clifton Abrams, which becomes a spectacular disaster: Chick's released peregrine falcons attack the ceremonial doves, police arrive to arrest Clifton on outstanding felony warrants, and Odette collapses in the parking lot.

Odette spends six days in the ICU, drifting between the living and spirit worlds. Friends confess at her bedside. Lester's ghost asks Odette to tell Barbara Jean he is sorry for marrying her when she was too young to truly love him. When Odette wakes, she delivers messages from the dead and instructs Barbara Jean to go to Chick and tell the whole truth.

Barbara Jean climbs to Chick's tower office and confesses that she manipulated his love to make him kill Desmond. Chick reveals he did not kill his brother: He arrived intending to, but found Desmond already dead. He let Barbara Jean believe otherwise so she would think he had done something for their son. Freed from decades of guilt, Barbara Jean tells Chick she has loved him since their first kiss and has never stopped. Chick responds by singing and dancing an old blues song, reprising the moment from their first night together.

Odette persuades Richmond to smuggle her out of the hospital, wanting to die beneath her birth sycamore. Richmond carries her up a hill in Leaning Tree and sets her against a tree trunk. But when a walnut drops into her lap, Odette realizes she is under the wrong tree. Her fury revives her: The fever has broken, the infection has released its hold, and Eleanor Roosevelt's prediction was wrong.

Three weeks later, Odette returns to the All-You-Can-Eat. Chick sits with the men, Barbara Jean is sober and at peace, and Clarice gossips without her old bitterness. Outside, Minnie, enraged after Clarice calls her a fake, leaps from her roof but lands on Sharon instead, breaking her ankle. Odette walks down the street with Mama's ghost, reflecting that she has much more good painting to do on the canvas of her life. Seeing her friends through the restaurant window, she reaches for the door.