Danny Coughlin dreams that a dead woman is buried in a shallow grave behind an abandoned gas station. She wears a charm bracelet on one wrist, which a dog is chewing. Danny lives in a trailer park and is the head custodian at Wilder High School in Kansas. He enjoys working in the summer without the chaos of students undoing his efforts. Two students work with him: a Black teen named Jesse Jackson and a truant worker named Pat Grady. The morning after his nightmare, Danny uses the library computer to look up the gas station from his dream and finds a picture of it. When Pat arrives late to work, Danny threatens to fire him.

Danny calls his ex-wife, Margie, to make sure they never drove past the gas station. Their relationship is amicable, though Danny harassed her in the past when he had an alcohol addiction, leading to his arrest over a restraining order. Danny is close friends with a neighbor, Becky, and her daughter, Darla Jean. That weekend, he drives to the gas station to prove the dream wasn’t real. There, however, he finds the dog and sees the dead woman’s arm, on which is a charm bracelet.