Soon after Ivy League-educated physician Richard Kline returns to his hometown of Bay Ridge to take over his father’s medical practice, his dreams of a steady, conventional life begin to crumble. His wife leaves him; health insurance vultures have descended on his practice; a mysterious Russian woman becomes his new bookkeeper; and a patient holds him at gunpoint in his own waiting room. Kline seeks help from two long-lost childhood friends: Sal Bondini, the son of a notorious mob boss, and Sean O’Toole, a police officer at the local precinct. As boys, the three friends were constantly up to their necks in trouble. As adults, they now may be in over their heads.

Every week for 20 years, three friends meet in a leafy enclosure under the Verrazzano Bridge: Gertie, a feisty Norwegian divorcée and former athlete; Maria, a family-obsessed Italian American widow; and Corinna, a book-loving, hash-smoking eccentric. Together they sit and watch the sea as the ships --- and the last years of their lives --- sail by. On the eve of Gertie’s 80th birthday, they realize that time is running out. Gertie decides she wants to travel the world. Maria secretly plots to reunite Gertie and Corinna with their estranged families. And Corinna falls in love. As the three women strike out in different directions, a series of events unfolds that threatens to destroy the most precious thing of all: their friendship.

In a small Northern Italian village, nine-year-old Luca Taviano catches a stubborn cold and is subsequently diagnosed with leukemia. His only hope for survival is a bone marrow transplant. After an exhaustive search, a match turns up 3,000 miles away in the form of a most unlikely donor: Joseph Neiman, a rabbi in Brooklyn, New York, who is suffering from a debilitating crisis of faith. As Luca’s young nurse, Nina Vocelli, risks her career and races against time to help save the spirited redheaded boy, she uncovers terrible secrets from World War II --- secrets that reveal how a Catholic child could have Jewish genes.