Stan Marshall sells furniture in the slow back-water town of Hastings in Eastern Montana—and hates it. Suffering along with Stan is his wife of eight years, Carrie. They have two children, Jenny and Angie, and Angie is chronically ill. The little girl’s malady causes considerable stress because Carrie’s father, a rich rancher, is always ready to use his money to show Stan as a loser. Carrie sees the practical side while Stan is blinded to it by his male ego. The Marshall home should be a happy one, but the tension of being constantly short of cash constantly works to shake their commitment to each other.

Stan’s boss, Greg Wellcombe, is overbearing, oversexed and overweight but Stan can’t quit his job because this is 1985 and jobs are impossible to find. Working at the store with Stan is Julie Meadows and they share two things in common, their hatred for Hastings and their disdain for Greg.  Julie hatches a scheme to make enough money to fund her escape from Hastings and asks Stan, who is honest and loyal by nature, to ignore a few things he’s about to witness at the store. Julie plays to Stan’s compassionate side, and wins, and uses her sexuality on Greg to get what she needs from him; namely, access to the store’s line of credit. Stan sees evidence that Julie’s scheme involves the illegal importation of South American antiquities, clay dolls.

Stan has befriended a truly odd character who had suddenly appeared in Hastings eight years previous. Ermil Kersanian is a 96-year-old Armenian with a past he talks very little about, but who is amazingly well read, and traveled.  When Stan tells Ermil of the South American artifacts, the old man expresses great interest and Stan discovers Ermil was a refugee of the Armenian genocide of the early 20^th century and had lived in Venezuela for over 40 years. His business there was dealing in the very items Julie means to smuggle into the USA.

As the story unfolds, Ermil points out Stan’s weaknesses and failures and helps him rectify them. The mud dolls that Julie and Greg are dealing with turn out to be something quite different. Soon they find themselves tangled up with Federal law enforcement and Greg manages to get the store impounded putting Stan out of work. Stan allows Carrie’s father to help get Angie to the expensive specialists she needs and the little girl’s life is saved.