On an early September afternoon Yosef and Mariam Getachew, a young couple who have spent all but the first year of their marriage apart, set off on a road trip from their new home in Peoria, Illinois to Nashville, Tennessee. The trip is a second-rate version of an American honeymoon, and ultimately a futile attempt to bring them closer together after three years apart. As soon as the trip begins it is ruined by a small act of violence that becomes the defining trait of not only their trip through the Midwest and South but also their marriage. While the story of Mariam and Yosef’s lives and marriage initially appears to be told by a third-person narrator, it is in fact being recreated and deliberately imagined by their son, Jona. Born six months after their drive to Nashville, Jona is actively inventing his parents’ journey thirty years later, after both have died. Their story begins in Peoria but reaches back to the first days of their relationship in Ethiopia and includes the tumultuous (and in Yosef’s case) violent years the couple spent living apartJona begins to cobble together his parents’ fragmented lives, each imagined scene shedding light on who they may have been before him,and providing a glimpse into the damaged and troubled existence they lived for as long as he knew them. In imagining the small details of their journey to Nashville, Jona recalls memories of his own childhood.These include formerly forgotten acts of intimacy such as the day his mother took him to school and began the first in a series of lifelong lessons known as Things You Must Not Ever Forget.

As a result, the trip and the years that preceded it become an aperture through which Jona can view his entire family history.