After enjoying more than twenty five years of peaceful and tranquil living in her little house by the golden pond, Beatrice gleefully learns that her exiled second husband, Fred, has finally dropped dead. Her euphoria and celebration plans are short lived once she realizes that since they had never divorced, it will be up to her and her adult children to clean up another one of his messes, thus dragging them all back into the manic and chaotic world that they all hoped to have left far behind.