Ben Wallace moves to a small Colorado mountain town with Sarah, his young daughter. Ben is a skeptic, but he doesn't mind renting his attic room to someone claiming to be God, especially since this God is troubled by his own grave doubts. Ben does not even mind that God mooches beer and is indifferent about paying the rent. Ben is less concerned with God's aggravating ways than he is with figuring out how it might be okay to leave one woman he loves for another woman he loves. Ben's marriage to Karen, volatile, ambitious child of the city, is fraying, and the unraveling quickens when he meets Megan, serene child of the mountains, child of a crazy, murdered father. Ben navigates the turbulent end of his relationship with Karen, falling in love with Megan, and rearing Sarah. Megan's brother violently opposes the relationship between Ben and Megan, for reasons buried in their childhood. Ben and Megan are forced to journey into the abandoned mine that contains these childhood secrets, igniting a dangerous confrontation.Typical small-town characters include George, contrarian newspaper editor, who spends his evenings in the Moose Jaw, drinking beer and arguing, if necessary, against his own editorials. Billy, the largest man in the county, dropped out of high school to drive a snowplow, and wanders the mountains, looking for the footprints of Thoreau and the secrets of Megan's childhood. Iris, Ben's rich, imperious neighbor, descendent of ranchers, loves Ben and Sarah and Megan; Iris also loves to hit anyone who vexes her over the head with a beer bottle; Iris is sorely vexed by Megan's brother, Tyler, who follows dangerously in their father's religiously demented footsteps.