Chona watches her neighbor Bernice Davis’s house and reflects that they have barely spoken in fourteen years, despite once being close. Bernice is known on Chicken Hill for her beauty, her many children, and her guarded private life; Chona hears most of what she knows through Addie, who avoids her.

Chona’s thoughts turn to childhood, when her father Yakov (“Reb” Flohr) arrived in Pottstown and built the Heaven & Earth Grocery with help from Shad Davis, Bernice’s father, a gifted stonemason. When the Jewish congregation’s hired architect squandered their money and the first shul collapsed, Reb hired Shad to rebuild it successfully, deepening an unlikely friendship across the Hill’s racial and social lines. After Shad died and his savings were stolen by a crooked advisor, Reb quietly helped Shad’s widow and children survive.

Chona remembers how she, a polio-stricken child determined to walk to school, attached herself to Shad’s children, Bernice and Fatty. In first grade, a teacher humiliates Bernice by calling her a “sparrow” for refusing to sing, even though Bernice sings beautifully at home and in church; Chona defends her, and the girls become friends, teaching each other skills and shadowing each other through school.

The friendship breaks in high school when a home-economics teacher tears apart Bernice’s dress for using the “wrong” stitch, even though Chona taught Bernice the same stitching Chona used. Bernice blames Chona, walks away from her, and then withdraws from school and public life, closing herself off. Chona grows into adulthood, marries Moshe, and becomes consumed by family loss and illness, while Bernice’s growing family passes by as distant shadows.

In the present, Chona’s urgency returns to Dodo, the deaf boy she has sheltered for four months and come to love like a child. Knowing a state agent, Carl Boydkins, is searching for Dodo and that Moshe would panic if he learns the danger, Chona brings Dodo to Bernice’s door to ask for help. Bernice, worn but composed, immediately advises Chona to cut a hidden hole in the fence and move Dodo into Bernice’s yard whenever the state man comes, because among her children “one colored looks just like the other,” then closes the door before Chona can say more.