In this dark, character-driven story, LeRoy’s prostitute mother rationalizes the coded hand signals she’s worked out with her biracial toddler—signals about how to act when he comes out from his room so as to entice more money from her clients—by thinking that “He wouldn’t remember it when he was older that he had watched his mother fuck strangers for money.” As a young man, LeRoy meets Harmon, a young white man, in an overnight lockup, the beginning of their shared twenty-year downward spiral into alcoholism and homelessness. They work together, drink together, brawl together, and as Harmon suffers from his final illness, they both bed Edna, a wealthy widow who, out of pity, curiosity, and loneliness, takes them into her vacation home by the river. Through a series of flashbacks and LeRoy’s adventure stories (this very smart but uneducated man’s attempts at fantasy writing), we learn of the people and tragedies that shaped their lives and those whose lives unravel along with theirs at the seams of race, class, and religion, and where no one ever quite tells the truth.