In Tokyo, the son works as an English tutor and drinks his nights away with friends at a gay bar. He’s entangled in a sexual relationship with a married man, and while he has built a chosen family in Japan, he is estranged from his mother in Houston, whose preference for the son’s oft-troubled homophobic brother, Chris, pushed him to leave home. Then, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, 10 years since they last saw each other, the mother arrives uninvited on his doorstep. With only the son’s cat, Taro, to mediate, the two of them bristle at each other immediately. The mother, wrestling with memories of her youth in Jamaica and her own complicated brother, works to reconcile her good intentions with her missteps. The son struggles to forgive. But as life steers them in unexpected directions, they begin to see each other more clearly.

The ghost of Kai, the love of Cam's life, won't leave Cam alone. He follows Cam from LA back home to Houston, his visits wild, tender and unpredictable. But Cam has changed, and when he reenters the orbit of his childhood best friend, TJ, and his family's bakery, neither Cam nor TJ is sure how to navigate their charged estrangement. Searching for a way past all the wounds and secrets --- a way to be okay together, maybe for the first time --- the pair find hope and sustenance from the most unlikely source.

Benson and Mike have been together for a few years, but now they're not sure why they're still a couple. When Mike finds out that his estranged father is dying in Osaka just as his acerbic Japanese mother, Mitsuko, arrives in Texas for a visit, Mike picks up and flies across the world to say goodbye. In Japan, he undergoes an extraordinary transformation, discovering the truth about his family and his past. Back home, Mitsuko and Benson are stuck living together as unconventional roommates, an absurd domestic situation that ends up meaning more to each of them than they ever could have predicted. Without Mike's immediate pull, Benson begins to push outwards, realizing he might just know what he wants out of life and have the goods to get it.

In the city of Houston --- a sprawling, diverse microcosm of America --- the son of a black mother and a Latino father is coming of age. He's working at his family's restaurant, weathering his brother's blows, resenting his older sister's absence. And discovering he likes boys. Around him, others live and thrive and die in Houston's myriad neighborhoods: a young woman whose affair detonates across an apartment complex, a ragtag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, hurricane survivors, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, a reluctant chupacabra.