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.

When a violent father receives a call from someone who claims to be his biological brother, he must re-evaluate what family means to him.

The impact of an absent father emerges in the gruesome stories of a young daughter as her alcoholic mother listens and reflects on the struggles of raising her alone.

A father driving his son's girlfriend home at night takes a deliberately wrong turn and stops on a back road, where he demands she stop seeing his son. To counter his ultimatum, the girl threatens to accuse the father of sexual assault before leaving the car and running home through the night.

A bitter divorcee and distant father having an affair with a younger, married woman gets a call that his son has gotten into trouble at boarding school. He travels to the school, where the headmaster says his son, who beat up another student, must transfer. In a series of events that makes him increasingly bitter, he ends up making his son's girlfriend cry in a restaurant.

A middle-aged man tells his son the story of how he once killed a man while driving when he was younger, and another about how his first wife—his wife before son's mother that the son knew nothing about—suddenly passed away.

In an attempt to impress his emotionally distant father, a boy ridicules his mother, who has loved him unconditionally even in his father's absence. Wracked with guilt, he yearns for her forgiveness - only to find that she does not hold it against him.

A boy rides along in his father's truck, but when he breaks his father's only rule—don't touch anything—by turning on the radio, he hears another trucker threatening the safety of his father.

When an alcoholic-turned-family man in modern-day Cleveland has sleeping problems due to his son’s night screaming, he is haunted by his other family that he left behind a decade prior. During a nightmare about his old family, he wakes up to an even more grim reality.

A boy looks back on the encounters he and his friend had with a troubled, violent classmate who murdered his own father.