An investigator stays in a family home in order to become acquainted with the family and all their intricacies while he investigates the case of family's adult son, who has threatens to kill the president of the United States to spare the lives of those involved in Vietnam.

A series of vignettes about various sons along a family tree.

Just before an American college student is set to leave for the airport after visiting her extended family in Ethiopia, she realizes her suitcases are too heavy. A fight breaks out between her relatives about what items should travel with her at their behest, versus which ones deserve to be left behind.

As an old woman revisits her family's quintessentially American history, she finds a way to respect and love her parents, despite the scandals and tragedies they endured.

A father who watches his Portuguese neighbors become blessed by material gifts after the death of their father contemplates his own uselessness and begins to believe that his family would be better off without him.

The children in a family grow tired of hosting their middle-aged cousin, but his expulsion brings unexpected strife to the family.

After a dying mother instructs her children to find their distant aunt and new guardian, they must step outside the home they have always known and embark on a journey toward their new life.

A son tells a series of stories, most of them about his father and stepfather. As the son describes a robbery that took place at his house in high school and his experiences with his father, a former Jehovah's Witness and current alcoholic, he begins to recall details from his childhood.

In an epistolary-like work, a father must choose between a job he loves and his relationship with his son.

Shorty after WWII, a young girl and her mother are forced to move into her grandmother's mysterious and bleak house after her beloved father dies from a heart attack.