His mother Sandy tries to keep the lines of communication open with younger son Tim while easing her emotional pain with marijuana. Father Ben, a perfectionist who worshipped Matt as much as he ignored Tim, insists on continuing to place a meal at the dinner table for the dead boy and begins to drink heavily. Eventually, without telling his wife, he takes a leave of absence from work and spends his days lost in reverie on a park bench. Tim, always in the shadows as the smaller, unathletic, less accomplished "other brother," struggles to get through school while trying to resist the recreational drugs his best friend Kyle Dwyer is always offering him and contemplating having sex with classmate Steph Connors. Sister Penny, away at college, dutifully comes home for infrequent visits and tries to help bridge the widening gap between her surviving brother and their parents.