| Plot: | A sharp-witted suburban wife, Terry Wolfmeyer, is left to raise her four headstrong daughters when her husband unexpectedly disappears. Things get even more hectic when she falls for her neighbor Denny, a once-great baseball star turned radio d.j. This leaves her daughters out on a limb. They are forced to juggle their mom's romantic dilemmas as well as their own.
According to Popeye, the youngest of her four daughters and narrator of the film, Terry Wolfmeyer is the "nicest, sweetest woman." However, she quickly transforms into an angry shrew when her husband, Gray, apparently runs off to Sweden with his secretary. Anger over her abandonment impairs her judgment as she refuses even to contact Gray to hear his part of the story. To take the edge off her pain, she becomes the drinking buddy and then the lover of Denny, a family friend and boozy ex-baseball player who hosts an "all jazz format" radio sports show. Their relationship seems supportive, but abrasive until a quirk of fate reveals what really happened to her husband.
In the suburb of Detroit, the upper middle class Terry Ann Wolfmeyer (Joan Allen) becomes a bitter woman when her husband apparently leaves her family and her, traveling with his Swedish secretary to her country. Her neighbor and close friend of the family, the lonely retired baseball player Denny Davies (Kevin Costner) and presently working in a talk-show in a radio, continues visiting Terry and her daughters, and drinking with Terry. Denny falls in love for Terry, but the wounded and full of anger Terry try to avoid a steady relationship with him. Meanwhile, life does not stop, and her daughters graduate, date, marry, sicken, as part of the dynamics of a family. Many years later, a profound secret is revealed, showing that Terry's anger was misplaced.
In an upper middle class suburb of Detroit, the Wolfmeyer family is less one person: husband and father Grey has run off with his Swedish secretary to her homeland. Grey's wife, Terry Ann, is not coping well with her husband's abandonment of his family. She is prone to drinking and Grey's action has spurred her drinking to new heights. Terry is emotional - most of her emotions of late have tended toward anger - and with the addition of her drinking problems, she will often have outbursts, both appropriate and inappropriate. She has to manage her four teen and twenty-something daughters - Hadley, Emily, Andy and Popeye - who are all going through various issues in their own lives, many of their decisions not supported by their mother. In turn, the daughters on the most part support their mother against their father, despite how difficult with which she has been to live. Into their collective lives comes neighbor Denny Davies. In Terry, Denny sees a woman, a lonely person, a drinking buddy and a person with a real life, as opposed to what he calls his own life. An ex-baseball star, Denny lives selling autographed baseballs and hosting a radio baseball talk show in which he refuses to talk about baseball, a symbol of his past glory. Terry and Denny's relationship is turbulent but they feed off of each other's needs and insecurities.
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