Everyone in Cape Cod thinks of Mother as a wonderful woman: hardworking, pious, and content. Everyone except her husband and her seven children. To them, she is a narrow-minded and selfish tyrant. The narrator Jay, a middle-aged travel writer, is one of the seven children. Together with his siblings, he finds himself at their mother's side when their father dies - the suffocating closeness there, in the literal motherland, evokes a range of emotions that eerily present the reader with what is usually only the horror of others.