Yonkers 1942. Bella is thirty-five years old, mentally challenged, and living at home with her mother, stern Grandma Kurnitz, whose financially strapped son Eddie deposits his two young sons on the old lady's doorstep. The boys are left to contend with Grandma, with Bella and her secret romance, and with Louie, her brother, a small-time hoodlum in a strange new world called Yonkers.