The mother reacts angrily when she first hears about the father’s ideas to open a service station. But once she sees the construction of the station in progress, “with half-built, chest-high walls in concrete block,” she sees there is “no turning back” and accepts the idea (56). But the father never finishes the station. On its opening weekend, the author writes, “the boy fretted that the station should be so raw and unfinished and that his father could not afford to pave even a small area around the pumps. Dust coated everything” (57). As the father and the boy work at the station, it remains unfinished. Its unfinished state troubles the boy because it symbolizes the father’s failure to realize his ideas.

The station remains a place of strange mystery inhabited by inhuman figures like the boy's dead brother Jim and the dog. The author writes, “As one who knew death, the first Jim would have felt at home with tools and engines, driveshafts, electrical systems, the smell of dust and exhaust and gasoline and foul toilets” (58). When the boy and the father discover the girl in the station, the boy half expected that she was Jim, rising from the dead.