When this novel opens, Renata, a waitress, has packed up her baby, Charlie, and taken off for the road. The baby's father and Renata's ex-boyfriend, Bryan, hasn't been told he has a son. Renata drives cross-country to begin a new life, hoping to stay free of emotional entanglements and the associations of a painful childhood. She ends up in Boston, living next door to Eleanor, a seventy-eight-year-old widow, who finds herself gradually stripping away the layers of complication in her life until she is living in virtually a plain white room. June, a young dance student, dangerously obsessed with thinness to mask her loneliness, is hired to look after Eleanor. These three women, from very different social backgrounds and ages, meet by chance and their lives become unexpectedly linked. When Bryan appears unannounced in Boston, Renata is forced to reconcile with her past and find a new meaning of family. The friendship among the three women transforms their lives.