A 13-year-old girl named Estrella travels through California in an old station wagon with her mother (Petra), her brothers (Ricky and Arnulfo), her twin sisters (Perla and Cookie), and “the man who was not her father” (Perfecto) (3). The car approaches a barn, and two teenage boys stealing peaches nearby (Alejo and Gumecindo) hide in the branches of the trees, watching.

Perfecto emerges from the car and asks about a “shabby wood frame bungalow,” which Petra confirms is the family’s destination (6). As the adults begin settling in, the children explore the barn. In a flashback, Viramontes explains that Estrella’s father left the family when the twins were babies, and that the strongest memory she retains of him is of him peeling an orange. The family was forced to move often in the wake of her father’s departure, “always leaving things behind that they couldn’t fit, couldn’t pack, couldn’t take, like a trail of bread crumbs” (14).

Perfecto scolds Estrella for playing in the barn, and tells her to help Petra. This segues into another memory: Petra’s recollections of how overwhelmed she was when her husband abandoned her and the children, and how Estrella, finding there was no food in the cupboard, “[tried] to feed the children with noise, pounding her feet drumming her hand and dancing loca to no music at all, dancing loca with the full of empty Quaker [box]” (20).