It’s July 1969 and while the attention of everyone else in her Long Island neighborhood is on the impending moonwalk, Tamara Ann Simpson’s focus is the black hole created by the sudden departure of her best friend, Kebsie, a foster child who lived across the street. She directs her considerable anger at Douglas McGinty, the new foster kid, whom she ironically dubs “Muscle Man.” In her self-absorbed grief, Tammy fails to see that the whoppers Douglas tells-he’s training for the 1972 Olympics, he’s sung on Broadway-are his way of coping with a major loss of his own.

In 1948, eleven-year-old Audrey lives with her father, mother,and three younger sisters in Jewell Valley, a coal mining camp in Southwest Virginia… where her mother still mourns the death of a baby, her father goes on drinking binges on paydays, and Audrey tries to recover from the scarlet fever that has left her skinny and needing to wear glasses.