Fifty-year-old Karen Anders, a high school English teacher and the adoptive mother of Tiffany, comes to terms with being a single-parent and a clumsy drunk in the multicultural melting pot of Houston, Texas, as she forges an unlikely friendship with Leona Supak, a WWII Hungarian refugee, who inspires Karen to change her views on motherhood, drinking, and men.

Karen’s teaching job provides an ongoing challenge with low scoring students and a lack of support from school administrators. Meanwhile, Tiffany moves to Austin to attend the University of Texas, but soon neglects...

Gracey Reiter confronts a painful past and an intimidating future with the approaching death of her father, Henry Mueller, the self-described “last Mohican” from the chaotic gene pool known as the Walsh-Mueller family. The present holds the answer, and the last opportunity for Gracey to understand her father’s alcoholism, her mother’s infidelity, and her siblings’ version of the truth.

Always present is Gracey’s past: the voices of her grandmother, Viola Mueller, and her great-great-grandmother, Irish immigrant Patricia Walsh Mueller. ...