Summary

In the Prologue, the narrator describes how Eleanor and her children, Alison, Ursula, and Toby launched balsa wood boats in the brook near their house each March. These boats carried corks decorated as people. Some of the cork people were thrown out of their boats. Some boats got stuck. Some boats and people disappeared entirely. Eleanor believed raising children was like creating cork people and then letting them go.

Eleanor focuses on her youngest child, Toby, who believed he could count on his family always being together in the same way he could depend on rocks, his favorite things, to be around forever. At one time, Eleanor had also believed that their family would always be together.

In Chapter 1, set in the future, Eleanor was holding her granddaughter, Louise, when the sound of a groaning crash shocked the people gathered for Al...