The story, narrated by ten-year-old Kenny Watson, opens on “one of those super-duper-cold Saturdays” in Flint, Michigan. The whole family—Dad, Momma, Kenny, and five-year-old Joetta—is huddled together on the sofa, trying to keep warm. Byron, who has just turned thirteen and is now “officially a teenage juvenile delinquent,” is sitting there, too, but keeping himself a little bit apart from the rest of the family, trying to act “cool and bored.” The thermostat is turned all the way up, and the furnace is “sounding like it [is] about to blow up,” but it is still ridiculously cold in the house. Dad turns on the TV to try to make everyone forget their discomfort, but that only makes things worse: there is a special news report on television, telling how bad the weather is and how long it will last, followed by a comment by the weather man comparing conditions in Flint to those in Atlanta, Georgia, where it is currently in the mid-seventies.

Momma, who was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, which is a mere hundred and fifty miles from Atlanta, exclaims, “I knew I should have listened to Moses Henderson!” Moses is an old boyfriend whom Momma gave up to marry Dad, and she jokingly says that she was “a young girl who made a bad choice.” Dad, who loves to clown around, starts telling stories about Moses, who had been nicknamed “Hambone” because of his oddly shaped head. The family, including Momma and even Byron, laughs uproariously. On a more serious note, Momma recalls that in Birmingham, “life is slower, the people are friendlier.” When Dad reminds her that Black people are not allowed to use the same facilities as white people there, she concedes that conditions are not perfect but that on the whole, “people are more honest about the way they feel” and, in a comment directed at Byron, “folks there do know how to respect their parents.”

Dad decides that it is too cold in their house to stay the night, so he calls Aunt Cydney to see if she will take them in. Aunt Cydney tells the Watsons to hurry over, and Dad goes outside to start up their dull brown 1948 Plymouth, dubbed “the Brown Bomber.” He then assigns the boys to scrape the ice off the car’s windows. Kenny gets right to work, but Byron dawdles, cleaning off the mirror on his side of the car and admiring himself in it. As Kenny continues scraping, he hears Byron calling him; Byron sounds funny, as if he has something in his mouth. Going over to investigate, Kenny discovers that Byron’s lips are frozen to the mirror, and he runs in the house to get Momma to come and help. The whole family comes outside. Momma screams, Joetta starts crying, and Dad begins to laugh hysterically, while Kenny reflects that it is no wonder that the neighbors think of them as “the Weird Watsons.” No one knows how to get Byron unstuck; pouring hot water over his lips and the mirror only makes things worse. Finally, Momma sends Dad inside to call the hospital for advice. She tells Kenny and Joetta to go in with him, but Kenny, sensing that Momma is about to do something drastic, stays behind. Sure enough, Momma, speaking reassuringly to Byron, gently puts one hand on his chin and the other on his forehead, and gives his head “a good hard snatch.” Kenny closes his eyes and covers his ears at this point, so he does not see or hear what happens, and when he looks again, Byron is running to the house with his hands over his mouth, with Momma right behind him. Kenny ends up having to scrape all the windows on the car by himself, and to get back at his brother, he makes fun of him on the ride to Aunt Cydney’s house, calling him the “Lipless Wonder.”