The story of the Bramble siblings--Margaret, Max, and Edie--captures life lived among children and adults, anchored by marriage or undone by it, unmoored by solitude or desperately in need of it. Margaret, mother of three, drowning in a sea of runny noses and lost mittens, is about to take her ailing father into her already overcrowded home. Edie, young and single, is struggling to find meaning in her desultory isolation. Max, newly unemployed and hiding it, is buckling under the responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood. Over the course of one critical season, a long-hidden secret will be revealed, remaking each of them and all they thought they knew about one another and about themselves.