In this debut collection of stories, Zev Good takes the reader into a world he knows and illuminates so well: the middle-class American South. In the opening story, "The Sweet By-and-By," an inexplicable tragedy brings to light the cracks in a family's foundation. In "Had," a man recalls his youth and must, at last, come to terms with the one love he could never have. The title story alternates between the present and the past, and tells us a truth we all know but find hard to admit: that to rescue ourselves, we sometimes have to leave others behind. These stories, populated with mothers and children, friends and lovers, the living and the dying, reveal the intricate and tenuous bonds that unite us all.