"This story opens on Memorial Day weekend in a seaside town on Long Island, where Ruthie, her still-adored ex-husband Mike, and the couple's sullen fifteen year old daughter Jem are packing up the last bits of their household, awaiting the yearly arrival of a wealthy renter from Manhattan ... And thus begins the summer when every possible thing that can go wrong in Ruthie's life seems to do so. Her relationship with Mike ... seems about to disappear...

When she drops out of school and struggles to start a career on Broadway in the fall of 1950, seventeen-year-old Kit Corrigan accepts help from an old family friend, a lawyer said to have ties with the mob, who then asks her to do some favors for him.