Thanksgiving Eve, 1991: Most things that lovable scoundrel Georgie Quinlan has tried to do in his life have gone horribly wrong. Marriage. Fatherhood. Most recently, an armed robbery. It’s the last thing that has Georgie on the lam and back in Gravesend, Brooklyn, the sleepy Italian American enclave where he hasn’t shown his face in a decade. He’s stolen a Joe DiMaggio–signed baseball from an old Irish pub, thinking it’s worth a pretty penny and that southern Brooklyn is the last place anyone will look for him. This, Georgie is wrong about. Awaiting Georgie in Gravesend are his wife, Loretta, whom he hasn’t seen in 12 years, and his teenage kid, Roz, who knows nothing about her father --- he’s been MIA for most of her life. But Roz is about to get a crash course in Georgie Quinlan. So is everyone else, whether they want one or not.

Gravesend, Brooklyn, 1986: Risa Franzone lives in a ground-floor apartment on Saint of the Narrows Street with her bad-seed husband, Saverio, and their eight-month-old baby, Fabrizio. On the night Risa's younger sister, Giulia, moves in to recover from a bad breakup, a fateful accident occurs: Risa strikes a drunk, erratic Sav with a cast-iron pan, killing him on the spot. The sisters are left with a choice: notify the authorities and make a case for self-defense, or bury the man's body and go on with their lives as best they can. In a moment of panic, they call upon Sav's childhood friend, Christopher "Chooch" Gardini, to help them. Over the vast expanse of the next 18 years, life goes on in the working-class Italian neighborhood of Gravesend as Risa, Giulia, Chooch and eventually Fabrizio grapple with what happened that night.