A 20-year-old woman feels trapped in her small mountain town and hopes to move to a city where she can become a professional store manager; but then her father dies, leaving her a debt-ridden mercantile that her neighbors need to survive the Great Depression.

She fears that her neighbors see her as a failure because several of her friends from high school have gotten well-paying jobs in the prosperity of the 1920s. She has cared for her bedridden father and operated the family’s mercantile, while her father kept the company’s books. She is surprised to find that the store is heavily in debt and unable to renew its line of credit because the Great Depression has forced their bank to avoid such risks. Her neighbors rely on the mercantile, which has extended them credit for the necessities of life. How can she continue to do this in her cash-strapped predicament? In normal times, she would sell the store, but the Depression makes that impractical, too.