Jimmy Madden is Killdeer, North Carolina's golden boy and favorite son, a basketball hero and gifted student, who carries the dreams of the whole town on his capable young shoulders. Voted Most Likely To Succeed by his high school classmates, he seems launched toward a brilliant, open-ended future. But all that changes in an instant one hot August afternoon in 1954, when his debutante girlfriend, May Tilley, tells him she is pregnant. As Jimmy and May's poetic youthful dreams give way to the harder prose of marriage and adult responsibility, they discover that love and passion aren't always enough to make a marriage work.

Twelve years later, Jimmy is working in his father-in-law's tobacco warehouse and May is continually disappointed by what their lives have become. The brunt of their unhappiness falls on their son, Joey. Turning to his grandfather for guidance, Joey learns that he must look for joy outside of his fractured family—and how to move from the world of childhood and become a man.