Lowell Edgecomb returns home to Maine after a successful career in Chicago and an unsuccessful relationship. At a friendly softball game he meets Fiona Sparrow, the daughter of a single mother and a black father. He is drawn to her shy sweetness, perhaps because like her he too is a child of a single mother and has long felt an empty space inside because of it. But their relationship meets resistance from a local racist Nazis group at the same time Lowell’s half-brother, Bill Paine, becomes ensnared by another softball player, this one a predatory female, Marilyn Prence, who causes Bill to betray his wife and little child.