Cherry narrates her backstory, describing her childhood in suburban Hornsby, Sydney, in the 1950s. She paints a vivid picture of a modest weatherboard house with a quarter-acre block, a kitchen with grape wallpaper, a backyard with fruit trees, chickens, and a shed where her father tinkered. Her childhood was defined by bushland adventures—catching tadpoles, building bonfires, and picking wild blackberries with her best friend Ivy, who lived next door.

Cherry's parents, Arthur Hetherington and Mae Mills, met at a New Year's Eve dance in 1946 at the Pacific Cabaret in Hornsby. Mae was eighteen and vivacious; Arthur was a shy, tall country boy who had served as an aircraft mechanic during the war. Mae read Arthur's palm and told him a dance was in his future, then was delighted to discover he was an excellent dancer. Their romance blossomed from that first meeting.

Cherry describes her father as a meticulous, logical man who worked for the railways and studied accounting by correspondence, dreaming of working at Transport House on York Street. He recognized Cherry's mathematical talent early—she could count to one hundred by age two—and nurtured it with banana-slice math games and shared homework sessions at the kitchen table. By age nine, Cherry balanced the family checkbook. Her father once told her she could study mathematics at Sydney University, which her mother met with skepticism, but Arthur insisted firmly on Cherry's potential.

Cherry also describes her Auntie Pat, who served as a nurse in the Australian Army Nursing Service and lost her fiancé as a prisoner of war on the Burma Railway. Pat never married. Cherry reflects on the many "old maids" in her neighborhood—women who lost potential partners to the war—including Miss Heywood, who cried while teaching piano, and Miss Piper, who kept named milking cows.

The chapter's central conflict involves Cherry's parents' disagreements over money, particularly life insurance. A door-to-door insurance man they nicknamed "Jiminy Cricket" collected monthly payments. Mae hated him and considered life insurance bad luck, superstitiously believing it would make death more likely. Arthur insisted it was for Mae and Cherry's security. He placated Mae by promising a holiday at a roadside motel with breakfast trays—a dream from their honeymoon—but Cherry reveals he never took them on that trip. The chapter ends with Cherry noting that arguing over money is a leading cause of divorce, and she obliquely references the young woman on the plane (Eve, who wore a wedding dress), suggesting Eve and her partner also argued about money—or possibly about Cherry herself.