A modest bungalow in a small town near Kansas City, and here lives Miss Field, a widow, and her twenty-one-year-old son...The time is 1933-the Depression-and they are lucky to have jobs, she as a hospital nurse and he as a gas station attendant. The young man is petulant and demanding, and his mother is loving in a mournful way, for she wishes the boy were the man his late father was. Into the house moves a friend from long ago...a stranded tank-town actress. She finds sanctuary here in return for doing the cooking and housework; it is to be a temporary setup, just long enough for the actor she has consorted with to find another job for them in Kansas City.