In July 2004, Edwidge, the 35-year-old narrator, learns she is pregnant the same day her father receives a diagnosis of pulmonary fibrosis, an incurable illness. Most of the family lives in New York; Edwidge married in 2002 and moved to Miami. Now she arrives in New York to accompany her father to the doctor. Her father, a 69-year-old cab driver originally from Haiti, has lost so much weight that as she leans to kiss him, “the blunt edge of his high cheekbones struck my lips hard” (2).

They visit a Jamaican herbalist who scans their irises and tells Edwidge she might be pregnant. At the doctor’s office, “a sad and desperate place” filled with “mostly Caribbean, African, and Eastern European immigrants” (5), Dr. Padman informs Edwidge alone of her father’s prognosis.

Back in her parents’ home, Edwidge takes a positive pregnancy test and informs her husband, Fedo: “I could imagine his calm, reassuring smile, broader with delight” (12). She keeps the news from her parents because “I couldn’t fully keep both realities in mind at the same time, couldn’t find the words to express both events” (13). A few days later, the whole family—including Edwidge’s brothers Bob, Kelly, and Karl—gathers at her father’s behest, “to discuss what is going to happen to your mother after I’m gone” (16).