"Jessup Burke, a lonely, naive sixteen-year-old, has grown up without a father in an indifferent, economically deprived logging town. Out of high school a year early, he now bikes the back roads and roams the woods with his fishing gear, daydreaming of his sweetheart and their secret "home" in an abandoned farmhouse.". "When twenty-nine-year-old Reg Cumber, an embittered, paranoid recluse - fresh out of jail for growing marijuana - encounters Jessup hitchhiking, he is drawn to the boy's naivete, and the two soon become irreversibly bound. Jessup befriends Marigold, Reg's younger sister, whose wayward husband, Hess, is descending into a dangerous and potentially violent life of emotional solitude. As Jessup unknowingly participates in Reg's perilous behavior, he also endangers himself when his relationship with Marigold hazards beyond friendship."--BOOK JACKET.