The Air We Breathe begins at a rest stop outside of Memphis during the first night of Maggie and her children's four-day journey across Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas, on their way to Mexico. From place to place, person to person, they move. All the time Maggie hopes for kindness that will take her a few miles further, and keeps the secret of what she has done from her children and new acquaintances.

In the quiet, still moments of her travels, she recounts her own childhood, as well as the few days that led up to the event from which she is fleeing. As Maggie covers mile after mile, she begins to understand how no one event can be isolated from another, how life, in its strangeness and mystery, seems to gather itself as we go, only to reveal why later--or maybe never.

In Maggie's words: "I'd like to say I know what makes people good and bad, but I can't say I do. Or at least I'd like to say I believe most people, including myself, are good, that we do the best we can. But I ain't sure of that either. I guess what I do believe is we just live the best we can and the rest is what we think we have to do at the time."

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