There is a built-in difficulty convincing a woman you haven't talked to in 20 years that you've loved her since you were six. Compound this with the fact that the woman was your first-grade teacher and now, as a first-year college professor, you have her pleasantly unmotivated son in one of your classes and you have a disastrous encounter just waiting to happen.

This is the situation facing Jeremiah Curtin, and it is, perhaps, the defining complication of his life. But there are others. As if in a fated, almost doomed way, Jeremiah feels he is following the career path of both...