Asphodel "Dell" Oletsky eavesdrops on the Party Line at her uncle Harp's farm, hoping to learn whether Clemson Louis Dew, the convicted "Lucky Rabbit's Foot Killer" who confessed to murdering her mother Lada, was successfully electrocuted on April 15, 1935. Neighbors gossip that Black Sunday's dust storm interfered with the electric chair, setting Dew's hood on fire and forcing the warden to cut him free. Dew survived and now waits in solitary confinement for an indefinitely postponed second execution; the chair is being sent to Amarillo for repairs.

Dell flashes back to February, when Sheriff Iscoe excitedly delivered the warden's invitation to attend the execution. Harp refused, telling Dell the Sheriff wanted victims' families in election-year photographs. Hearing the botched execution news brings no relief—Dell now suffers vivid imagined visions of Dew's screaming and burning, layered atop her grief over her mother's lonely death.

When Dell asks Harp directly whether he believes Dew killed Lada, Harp answers only that the boy confessed and that he doesn't know. To distract her, he takes her outside to shoot baskets at the hoop on the barn door. They play wordlessly until the Big Dipper appears, finding brief intimacy in shared exhaustion and laughter.

Dell reflects bitterly on the town's response to her mother's murder: initial performative sympathy followed by avoidance, as if Lada—an unmarried, indebted drunk—mattered less than a married or wealthy victim would have. She recalls Hayes County Sheriff Joe Lacy's indifference to her leads about Lada's acquaintances, and Sheriff Iscoe's pressure to identify Dew from a photograph she didn't recognize, accompanied by leering insinuations about her mother.

That night, Dell tries to talk to Harp about the haunting images, but he tells her to stop eavesdropping and looks overwhelmed himself. Recognizing that Harp is too frail to help carry her burden, Dell concludes she is alone with her doubts about Dew's guilt and her grief.