- The phone is ringing, and no one is answering it. Why the heck is no one answering it? At least that's what Joe thinks, especially considering how he's totally hung over.
- Turns out the phone is for Joe. He walks past all the bakery machinery and finds that it's his mother on the other line. Joe's father has died. A co-worker drives Joe to his home in Los Angeles.
- Joe goes into his quiet house, where his father is laid out under a sheet in the living room. We learn that his father had been sick for a long time. Joe's mother tells him that the undertakers are on their way.
- One of Joe's two younger sisters, the older one, is crying, and Joe notices for the first time that she has matured into an adult.
- The undertakers come, and Joe goes to have a last look at his father before they take the body.
- Joe thinks about how his father has died relatively young at fifty-one years old. He also thinks about how things hadn't gone well for his father, who in Joe's mind wasn't quick or determined enough.
- The undertakers put the body in a basket and carry it down the stairs. Joe's mother says to him that the body only seems like Joe's father.
- What now turns out to be a memory ends, and that phone is still ringing.
- Something is wrong. Joe begins to realize that he must be pretty badly hurt, but he doesn't know how. When he was a kid in Colorado, he once woke up from a nightmare thinking that he'd been suffocated in the eruption of Pompeii, and he feels kind of like that now.
- Joe tries to move but realizes that he is covered from head to foot in bandages.
- To make matters worse (and they're going to keep getting worse from here), Joe realizes that he is deaf.
- We then learn that Joe was in the war (World War I) when he mentions a bombproof dugout. Joe guesses that his injuries are probably war-related.
- He remembers some gruesome experiences in the war that he associates with sound and thinks that he will not miss hearing them.
- Joe recalls another childhood memory of a swimming ditch in Colorado, and then he remembers his father and mother playing on a sled in the snow.
- Joe imagining his parent's courtship. He thinks about how his mother would play the piano for his father over the telephone, which at the time was a new invention.