Rosemary works as a communications consultant for a public relations company - her latest assignment is to promote a bug-infested island with an unstable military regime as a fantasy vacation destination. She approaches her job with indefatigable humor, yet deep down feels guilty about compromising her ethics. The friendship and good intentions of her volunteer neighborhood watch group provide some compensation, but that balance is impossible to achieve when it comes to her daughter.

Why won't Shelly finish her college applications and think about the future? Because she's interested in only one thing, her new boyfriend, Dee, who comes with his own problems: a struggling rap group, a father in prison, a cousin in the drug trade. When Rosemary reluctantly allows Dee to move in with her and Shelly - just until he finds a job, Shelly promises - she comes face to face with her own contradictions.

All her standards change, Rosemary discovers, when her daughter's welfare is involved - every parent's predicament.

Distraction and relief come to Rosemary in the person of Viktor Hajek, a sophisticated journalist from Czechoslovakia, whom she meets most inauspiciously during a neighborhood watch outing, when they collide as he is aiming a broom at the robber she is chasing and she ends up face-down on the sidewalk. They develop a dialogue and then a romance, and Rosemary is faced again with the complicated options that life presents.