Lisa's maddening struggle to get Aldo and Ella into the car for the 5-hour drive to Marco's home in LA evokes old memories of a fraught family car trip. Back then it was her dad who kept secrets. Now? It's the whole Giordano clan.
Trapped in the back seat of her parents' car, Lisa's mind replays the moments that shattered her marriage. Tano's encounter at the airport has him wondering if he could be a father. Marco bonds with one of his employees.
Lisa makes a friend during a roadside coffee stop. Aldo's bigotry rears its racist head, while his memory visits a time when he was the hated "other." Marco and Tano prepare for what will inevitably be a fraught Giordano family Christmas.
Ella enters a German-speaking fugue state that has her in mid-1940s Germany, amidst a family dynamic even more tense than that of the Giordano's. Aldo is pulled over on the 210 freeway and comes dangerously close to being arrested.
Lisa ditches the family for a date with a guy she met at the airport. But she can't stop thinking about the first time she met Bill. It's almost as if he were there. Which, by the way, he IS when she comes home. The next morning.
Christmas morning at the Giordano house is rife with memories of - Christmas morning at the Giordano house. The other one. When they were kids.
Tano flashes back to his breakup from Sarah and wonders if his life could have been different had he not had such a toxically masculine father. Christmas dinner blows up when Tano learns that Lisa's been keeping a secret.
Another dysfunctional holiday behind her, Lisa struggles to figure out why she keeps sabotaging her life. Could it be tied to a misadventure she and her best friends had in high school? Something they never spoke of?