Anchor plot: While en route to Wal-Mart for grass seed, Ray and Mary Burkett, with their dog Biznezz in the back seat, fight about the state of their lawn, his smoking, and her obesity. Mary demands they stop at a convenience store in order for her to purchase a purple kickball for their niece's birthday, and while Ray and the dog are waiting in the car, Mary suffers a heart attack in the store and immediately dies. Ray is fetched from the car by a store employee. The emergency medical technicians arrive, pronounce her dead, and remove her body. Ray remains with the store employees and customers, recounting Mary's County Fair awards for her quilting. After nearly two hours have passed, he returns to the car, where Biznezz has died from the extreme heat in the car, with the remnants of a Sno Ball Ray had fed him earlier still in his whiskers. This causes in Ray a simultaneous welling-up of "great sadness" and "amusement".
The story is written in third-person limited narrative and reveals a number of Ray's more egocentric thoughts throughout the story's events, such as being disturbed at the similarity between the manager's attempts at mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and French kissing, the thought that a bystander might give him a mercy fuck, and, as the story closes, the thought that he can now smoke whatever, whenever, and wherever he likes.

Plot A: The Father, an aging, half blind man who carries the title of colonel within the village, has made a promise to bury the recently deceased former doctor in spite of the consensus within Macondo that he should be left to rot within the corner house where he had lived in complete social isolation for the past decade.  The daughter, Isabel, is obliged to accompany her father out of respect for traditional values while knowing she and her son will be doomed to face the wrath of her neighbors in Macondo.  The narrative of the grandson, on the other hand, is more preoccupied with the mystery and wonder of death.
As with many of his stories, such as Love in the Time of Cholera and Chronicle of a Death Foretold,  García Márquez introduces a dramatic scene to begin his narrative and then moves backward, rehashing the past that will lead up to the ultimate conclusion.  It is discovered within the narrative that the center of all the conflict (the deceased) is a doctor who came to Macondo with a mysterious past and no clear name.  The man's only saving grace is a letter of recommendation from the Colonel Aureliano Buendia, one of the main characters of the later  One Hundred Years of Solitude.  It is this letter that leads the stranger to the family that serves collectively as narrator to the drama that unfolds.

Plot B: Nora Cotterelle, a woman in her 30s is caring for her ill father, Louis Jenssens.
While Nora tries to present a facade that all is well with her life, she is twice divorced and has a son, Elias, whose father is dead. Elias has behavior problems caused by autism.
Nora's present relationship is not going well, and she is soon to marry a businessman, while Elias is becoming increasingly withdrawn.
A parallel storyline follows her former lover and second husband, Ismaël Vuillard, a musician, with whom she had lived for seven years. He is given to strange behaviour, and as a result he has been committed to a mental hospital, from which he is planning to escape.
Nora learns that her father's digestive problems are actually cancer, and facing her father's death, Nora desperately seeks out Ismaël to ask that he reconnect with Elias, but he has mixed feelings about adopting her son. Moreover, he has met Arielle, another patient.