Keyword Ungrateful Child

A hard-working mother inches towards disaster as she divorces her husband and starts a successful restaurant business to support her spoiled daughter.

Wealthy socialite Charlotte Cartwright and her dear friend Alice Pratt, a working class woman of high ideals, have enjoyed a lasting friendship throughout several decades. Recently, their lives have become mired in turmoil as their adult children’s extramarital affairs, unethical business practices, and a dark secret threaten to derail family fortunes and unravel the lives of all involved. Charlotte and Alice decide to take a breather from it all by making a cross-country road trip in which they rediscover themselves and possibly find a way to save their families from ruin.

Papa Strauss, a widower, is being shifted around from one married-son's home to the other, and is unwelcome at all because his daughter-in-laws' object to his smelly pipe smoking. Finally the family tucks him 'out of sight and out of mind' into a nursing home, with very little 'honor thy father' thought given to it. However, unmarried daughter, Lena, who loves her father dearly, has a bright fiancée, who makes a lot of money off of a patent, and they make a home for him.

Generational saga tracing the events in the lives of the midwest pioneering Nordholm family, as seen through the eyes of businessman Orin Nordholm Jr., who ages from a youth to an elderly grandfather.