In Memory of Herman

On the coldest day of the year, young Randy Hardwick's pet frog Herman has died, and the family gathers in the backyard to bury him. Randy gives a heartfelt little eulogy for "a really good frog," while his shivering father, Vic, mostly wants to get the funeral over with and go inside. When Randy asks whether he will ever see Herman again, his mother, Amanda, tells him he will in heaven, and reminds him of what he learned in Bible school about Jesus dying and rising again. Vic cuts in with the opposite view: "When you die, you're dead, son." Amanda gently answers that no one has ever proved death is the end, and that even if she doesn't know whether Herman will be in heaven, Randy should want to be there to find out.

Once Randy heads off to school, the disagreement between his parents boils over. Vic accuses Amanda of manipulating their son and indoctrinating him with religious "mumbo-jumbo," insisting they had agreed to let Randy make up his own mind. Amanda pushes back, arguing that eternity matters because their son's soul is at stake. She answers Vic's objections one by one: Christians say Jesus is the only way to heaven because Jesus said it about himself, liars don't willingly die for their lies, and a crazy man could hardly have preached and lived the Sermon on the Mount. Vic counters that he's a good person who doesn't need saving, and complains that religion is coming between them. In the heat of the moment he even makes a bitter crack about going out and having an affair so Amanda's church would let her divorce him. He apologizes at once, but as he leaves for work he asks a question that stings: "How can you love me when you don't respect me?" Left alone, Amanda turns to prayer.

At the job site, where Vic and his partner and best friend Hank are painting the Harrigan building, Hank needles Vic about his claim to being a good person. Vic won a painting contract by telling the Harrigan Corporation that his competitor, Jack McLaughlin, uses inferior paint, when it is actually the very same paint they use themselves. Vic shrugs it off as just business, but Hank points out that McLaughlin, who attends Amanda's church, likely wouldn't have done the same to him. As the wind picks up, the two men try to move their scaffolding. It gets away from them, and despite Vic's shouts to let it go, it topples into a power line.

Meanwhile, Amanda has been hosting a Bible study, and her neighbor from across the back fence, Whit, lingers afterward to ask what's troubling her. As she pours out the story of the frog funeral and the morning's fight, a phone call brings terrible news: there has been an accident at the building where Vic works, and someone may be dead. Before Amanda can rush out the door, the hospital calls, and to her overwhelming relief it is Vic himself on the line. He has only a cut needing stitches, but Hank has been badly hurt, and Vic is staying with him until Hank's wife arrives. Shaken, Amanda tells Whit that Vic could have died that day as an unbeliever. Whit responds with a story from his boyhood, when a farmer named Gosnell sent him to plow with a mule that simply refused to move no matter how he hollered. The farmer told him the mule had been on the farm twenty years, knew exactly what to do, and would do it when it was good and ready. "Your job is to be there when it happens," Whit says, and he applies the lesson to Amanda: she cannot save Vic, only God through Jesus can, and Vic already knows what to do.

When Vic comes home trembling, he confesses that Hank is in intensive care in critical condition, that the accident feels like his fault, and that as his best friend lay on the ground his first shameful thought was relief that it wasn't him. He also admits that at the hospital he kept thinking how, if he had died, his family's last memory of him would have been that morning's stupid argument. Then he and Amanda discover Randy standing at Herman's grave, where he has been all afternoon, angrily telling God he will never talk to him again for taking Herman away. Kneeling with his son, Vic admits he doesn't know whether Randy will see Herman again, but says he was very wrong in what he has been teaching him, because losing his own best friend almost taught him how fragile and precious life is. Randy forgives his daddy, and Vic promises that tomorrow they can look for a new "bestest friend."

Amanda refuses to say I-told-you-so; instead she apologizes for trying to force Vic to believe, admitting it just doesn't work that way. Vic, in turn, says that many things he took for granted have been shaken, and that he has questions about her faith that never occurred to him before, questions he wants to talk about right away. As Vic heads inside, Whit hurries over to check on him, and Amanda sums up the day's quiet miracle with a smile: "The mule is starting to plow."