"A few days after Christmas in a small suburb outside of L.A., pairs of a man's pants hang from the trees. The pants belong to Howard Young, a prominent history professor recently diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Howard's wife Annie summons their daughter Ruth. Freshly disengaged from her fiancé and still broken up about it, feeling that life has not turned out quite the way she planned, thirty-year-old Ruth quits her job, and arrives home to find her parents' situation worse than she'd realized"--,Provided by publisher.