After accepting a last minute elementary school teaching job, Bean transplants herself to a small Alaskan fishing town. Love and marriage follow, surprising Bean, who feels her husband, Mick, is not only the best thing to happen to her, but the only good thing. Then Mick vanishes climbing Mt. McKinley and Bean is thrown back on herself and into the company of Mick's mother--an arthritic woman in her seventies with a penchant for stealing. With gentle humor, pathos, and a never-failing sense of hope, Marquis writes of Bean's struggles with devastating loss and the need to rebuild.