At the end of the school term, Catherine waits with her bags for her father to pick her up. She waits and waits... for three weeks, making excuses for him and hoping he'll show up.

Harry Ames, Catherine's father, calls one night, and she's soon on her way to Nova Scotia, where Mr. Ames lives in a small house. When Catherine's parents divorced she was very young, and so she barely knows this man, her father. Then one night she finds herself driving in an old car with three drunk and delirious men in the backeseat, her father among them. Catherine's fear and anger envelope her, and she thinks her mother must have been right about him.

But Harry Ames fills Catherine's days with his love and enthusiasm for poetry, nature, and travel as they share wild, sunlit times together near the sea. Then at night, there is always the fear...Will Catherine ever understand her father? Can she ever begin to know this moonlight man?