The narrator, Liz, opens by stating that she told her manager at the Los Angeles bank where she worked that she was returning to Denver because she “missed her mother and the mountains” and because “California […] was too crowded and expensive” (119). However, when she later gets in her car to drive away, she thinks of the true reason she is leaving and cries.

Liz grew up in North Denver with her mother and father: “I admired them—my outgoing mother with black 1960s Hollywood hair and my father with his gentle green eyes and a confident work-boot gait” (119-120). However, she also recalls that her father once threw a bag of groceries at her mother’s face, and many other instances of his physical brutality against her mother: “It’s not his fault, [her] mother would tell [Liz], painting a picture of his childhood in Detroit, where one night his schizophrenic father shot his mother and then turned the gun on himself” (120).

When Liz was 13, her father abandoned the family to be with another woman. Both she and her mother became inconsolable. Six months later, they moved into a two-bedroom apartment with a view of Cheesman Park. Although Liz’s mother instructed her to think of the apartment as their home, Liz never warmed up to the space.