In the waters off the Baja coast, far from her childhood home of Tallulah, Tennessee, marine biologist Freddie McBroom studies the life habits of grey whales with her scientist husband, Sam.

An ex-medical student expelled for stealing cadaver parts, Freddie has left the South and her past behind, never once looking back; practical and serious, she is the antithesis of her eccentric sisters, Eleanor and Jo-Nell, who have remained in their hometown to carve out very different lives for themselves amid the small-town day-to-day of Tallulah.

Eleanor, an older-than-her-years agoraphobic doughnut baker who talks herself through traumatic trips to the local Winn-Dixie, shares her home with free-spirited, sharp-tongued Jo-Nell, whose penchant for cowboys and large amounts of tequila has propelled her headlong through life.

Looking out for all of them is their grandmother, Minerva Pray - vice president of the Tallulah Widows' Club - a woman whose faith has run dry but for the divine inspiration she finds in providing gargantuan quantities of homemade pound cake to a community that always seems to be burying someone.

As Jo-Nell lies in a hospital bed after her Volkswagen is rammed by the midnight train, McBrooms past and present swirl around her in a haze of painkillers; she becomes the unlikely magnet pulling the sisters together, forcing them to confront their histories, futures, and one another, ultimately proving, as Freddie points out, that "the pull of family is stronger than gravity."