Charles Dickinson

Shy and compassionate moneylender Harry Waltz is the richest man in Marathon, Michigan, and at sixty-one, has dedicated his life to bringing "honor and gentlemanliness" to loan-sharking. His wife died twenty years ago, he lost one son in Vietnam, helped put the other in prison, and his twin daughters have grown up and moved away. He lives alone in a large house surrounded by repossessed automobiles, and expects his life to continue at the quiet pace he is accustomed to.

But when he falls in love with forty-two-year-old lawyer Mary Hale, everything changes. She gets his son out of prison, and he moves back home, along with the twin daughters, one of whom is pregnant by her out-of work husband, and the other who is enamored with the same man. To complicate his life even further, his clients have stopped paying their debts, and now it seems that he is losing any sense of the stability he had come to rely on.