Widow's Blind Date takes place at some time near the present on an early autumn afternoon in the baling room of a wastepaper company in Wakefield, Mass. Two men, both about thirty, are trading jokes, insults, and recollections as they bale up old newspapers; Archie Crisp is a tough, wiry, veteran worker at the plant, and George Ferguson, a big guy, long out of work in the depressed regional economy, has been hired on for the day.

Neither man is very bright; their talk is small town talk, mostly having to do with whatever happened to various former classmates and accounts of schoolday pranks long past. Archie, however is nervous. He's got a date with Margie Burke, a woman who long ago left a small-town life far behind her and who has called Archie up out of the blue. Both men, as it turns out, have lusted after "Mahhaghee" since the second grade.

When Margie appears - apparently cool, stylishly casual, clearly out of the men's league - little things begin not to add up. The little things keep not adding up into bigger and bigger things until - in due course - the central shattering secret is revealed.