It is 1970. "Bean" Holladay is twelve and her sister Liz is fifteen when their artistic mother Charlotte, a woman "who flees every place she's ever lived at the first sign of trouble, " takes off to "find herself." She leaves her girls enough money for food to last a month or two. But when Bean gets home from school one day and sees a police car outside the house, she and Liz board a bus from California to Virginia, where their widowed Uncle Tinsley lives in the decaying antebellum mansion that's been in the family for generations.