Finbar McBride, a handsome dwarf, just wants to be left alone. When Fin's train-store boss dies and leaves him an abandoned depot in rural New Jersey, he hopes solitude will at last be his. He arrives in town a man who does not want to be bothered. But his life unwittingly intersects with the tracks of two others: a grieving painter who nearly runs Fin over and a loney, motor-mouthed hot dog vendor always hungry for conversation. In spite of himself, Fin becomes swept up in their lives, and even in a romance with the town's sexually provocative librarian--as he reinvents himself as the catalytic center of a community.