Birdee Pruitt is a Chicago housewife who is invited on the national Toni Post talk show under the pretense of getting a free makeover. Instead, she is ambushed with the revelation that her husband, Bill, has been having an affair with her best friend Connie. Humiliated, Birdee and her precocious daughter Bernice move back to Birdee’s hometown of Smithville, Texas, with her eccentric mother Ramona and her young, imaginative nephew Travis. As Birdee and Bernice leave Chicago, Birdee gives Bernice a letter from Bill, telling her how much he misses her. Birdee struggles to make a new life as a working adult and mother and deals with the growing attraction between herself and a former high school classmate, Justin Matisse, who Ramona hopes that Birdee will get together with.