"Rafe"" is an eastern Oklahoma farm boy who does everything wrong -- until he does one important thing exactly right.
Rafe, in the authors words, "was a spiritual dropout, physically attending school but intellectually truant. He hadn't missed a class all winter, but more and more his restless mind had defected. He worried a lot, because he had a lot to worry about. Big and little things; past, present, and future things; distressingly actual things and possible things and improbable things. ... It just didn't seem right to Rafe that the Laytons should be scattered around all the time like that, him and Mitch in Dogwood, their dad and Arnie isolated on the farm north of the river, and their mother working away to hell and gone. If some kind of big disaster happened on a school day they might not ever get together again, but would spend the rest of their lives poking through the ruins, looking for each other."
Laid-back, good-natured Pete Cornshucks, a widower and Rafe's next-door neighbor, is a Cherokee Indian. He and Rafe's dad served together during WWII; Pete was a sergeant and Rafe's father had been a corporal in the same platoon, both earning Purple Hearts, battle stars, Unit Citations, and more. Pete had even earned a Silver Star, and he'd been the one to talk Rafe's father into buying the much loved farm next to Pete's.
On a bright sunny day in rural Oaklahoma, Pete and Rafe's lives are changed forever when a natural disaster hits, spinning both headlong into paths that force them to make split-second decisions which will spare or take the lives of those they love the most.
