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It’s the summer of 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic, and Lara and her family—her husband Joe Nelson and their three adult daughters, Emily, Maisie, and Nell—spend their days of social distancing working on the family’s cherry farm in Michigan, Three Sisters Orchards. Emily still lives nearby, and Maisie and Nell have returned from college to the relative safety of their rural family home. Each one is at a different stage of their lives; Emily plans to take over the farm with her boyfriend Benny someday soon, Maisie worries about her future as a vet and dreamy, fragile Nell is desperate to succeed as an actress but unsure how to get there.
The farm is very short-handed because of Covid-19, and so everyone pitches in to help bring in the harvest. As they pick cherries, Lara’s daughters ask her to tell stories from her youth in New Hampshire. They are particularly interested in hearing about her time as an actress and her romantic relationship with the famous Peter Duke. Duke is an actor, whom the daughters know Lara briefly dated during her own (short) acting career. Lara begins telling them the story of her past, beginning with her start in theater. She was first cast as the character Emily in the Thornton Wilder play Our Town in high school. During her junior year of college Lara is cast as the character Emily for a second time. A director called Bill Ripley is in the audience to see his niece, but instead of working with her, he approaches Lara to offer her a screen test for a film he’s making in LA. Lara, who isn’t expecting this, is startled but delighted when she wins the role, despite the misogyny of the audition process.
Back in 2020, Emily, Maisie, and Nell are all chafing against their close proximity and their inevitable regression to their childhood roles. Joe pays the most attention to Emily’s opinions about how the farm should be run and the harvest collected, as she’s the only one of his daughters with a qualification in horticulture. As they pick cherries, Lara continues her story: back in the 1980s, the release of the film Ripley casts her in is delayed, so she hits some professional snags. Having failed to get Broadway work in New York, she ends up taking the role of Emily in another production of Our Town with a professional troupe in Michigan called Tom Lake. There, she meets the then-unknown actor Peter Duke. Sebastian, Duke’s brother, comes to visit Michigan and starts a romantic relationship with Lara’s friend and understudy Pallace. Lara and Duke quickly develop an intense romantic relationship themselves. Both are talented and attractive, but the relationship feel impermanent and unsafe because of how fleeting things are in the theater. Everything is necessarily temporary in summer stock productions, as theater workers convene for a few months before dispersing to other projects. In addition to this, the lead actor in Our Town, Albert Long, has a drinking problem which is quickly worsening. Lara begins to worry things are slipping out of control.
In real-time 2020, the family discuss their worries about the future and Emily’s ideas about marriage and children. All the other family members also worry about what’s to come, especially Lara and Joe, who are watching their cherry farm flail financially. Lara continues her story: back in 1988, the Tom Lake show’s director (who is revealed to be her husband Joe himself) invited Lara, Duke, Pallace, and Sebastian to his family cherry orchard. Lara and Duke also begin rehearsals for another play, Fool for Love. Performances of the show begin, but Alfred Long has a medical emergency late one night and quickly dies of complications from his alcoholism. Joe takes his role in Our Town. Duke has begun drinking heavily and pressuring Lara to do the same in rehearsals for Fool for Love. When Lara has to withdraw from both plays because she tears her Achilles tendon during a tennis game, her friend Pallace takes her role. Duke and Pallace quickly begin sleeping together and unsuccessfully hiding it from Lara and Sebastian. After her movie is released, Lara decides that she doesn’t want to be an actress anymore. After a brief period back in New Hampshire looking after her grandmother Nell until she dies of breast cancer, she moves to New York to work behind the scenes on costumes at a Broadway theater. There she meets Joe again, and the two eventually fall in love and move to the cherry farm, which he has now bought from his aunt and uncle.
In 2020, it transpires that Duke has recently died in a boating accident. Lara’s daughters have mixed and uncomfortable feelings about Lara’s time with Duke and how flawed he turned out to be. Lara wonders what they would think if they actually knew everything. She reveals that she actually saw Duke again twice after he became famous. He showed up at the farm briefly years before, and—more eventfully—during her time in New York, Duke manipulated her into visiting him in rehab where the two had sex. Lara reveals to the reader she got pregnant and had an abortion secretly. A short while after Lara tells the truncated version of the story, Duke’s brother Sebastian arrives. He explains to Lara that Duke loved the farm so much he tried to buy it. When Joe’s family wouldn’t sell, he bought a plot in the nearby cemetery so he could be laid to rest there. They bury Duke, and the novel ends.
