The prologue sets the scene on a Cape Cod beach town in midsummer, painting a picture of the peninsula's tourist-laden highway alongside its quieter natural beauty: sandy cliffs, pink roses, and an ocean populated by great white sharks beneath the surface.

Inside a slightly rusting silver Subaru station wagon, an unnamed woman in her fifties sits in the passenger seat. She is positioned generationally between her young adult children and her elderly parents, married to a handsome husband who only partially understands her. The narrator reflects on her body, her long history of summer trips to this rental house, and how time has softened past hardships into pastel memories of taffy, clam strips, and her aging parents in beach chairs, with grief flickering at the edges.

The woman and her husband have just picked up their grown children from the train station to head to the small house they rent for one week each year. Overwhelmed with happiness at having her kids with her, she keeps turning to smile at them and refrains from complaining about the traffic.

Unprompted, she quotes William Blake: "And we are put on earth a little space, that we may learn to bear the beams of love." Her twenty-year-old daughter questions the source, and the mother sheepishly admits the poem may be titled "The Little Black Boy," prompting a wry exchange about Blake's abolitionist credentials. They debate whether "beams" means wood or light. The mother sighs that being human is "crushingly beautiful," while the daughter counters that it's also "terrible and ridiculous," with the narrator suggesting it may be all three—framing the tone for the week ahead.