The narrator of these short stories is a social worker who works for an agency for the blind, many of whose clients are diabetic, alcoholic, or mentally disabled as well. Over the course of the stories, the narrator leaves this work to go back to school in the arts, a personal ambivalence that may play some role in her continual, often dry critique of her clients, her work, and herself. Mostly, though, she casts a gruffly compassionate eye on the hard yet often rich and triumphant lives her clients lead, faced with financial and physical hardship as well as social ostracism.
A woman who works at a rehabilitation center for the blind reflects on the deaths of the people around her, clients as well as patients. She recounts the reaction of the staff to the death of a well-loved employee of the center whose name the narrator doesn't recognize. As she assists the blind clients at the funeral home, she suddenly realizes she did know the dead woman, but never had known her name. The narrator reflects on how a sight-impaired friend of hers, Vange, approaches life with supreme attentiveness, and never misses any details. The colleague's funeral reminds the narrator that living means being more like Vange.
