Beatrice would be quite pleased to spend the rest of her days in bed, buried in covers that block out the world, thank you very much. Ever since her husband died, and with her only child a preoccupied mother and wife, she doesn't have a reason to get out of bed any more. That all changes when her flighty sister, Jenette, and her ornery dog show up on her porch. Bea has no choice but to let her in, and this one poor decision, demanded by etiquette, turns her life cuckoo. The sisters discover Beatrice's mild-mannered husband left her a house in Florida. Jenette is convinced he had a woman on the side. Beatrice is just as convinced he did not. In a mere twenty-four hours of her sister's arrival, Bea is on the road to Florida with only a suitcase of clean underwear and her featherbrained sister for company. Somewhere between the road trip, Pedro's Pleasures, the Hawk Avenue bachelors, and a fabulous makeover, Beatrice stopped dragging her heels and began having fun. The migration south turned out to be exactly the thing she needed to rediscover her youth and take her perch as a chick on Nightingale Lane.