Spanning the 100-day Persian Gulf War and a small California town's girls' basketball season, Home and Away is the story of Hedy Gallagher Castle, a woman who has reached a crossroads in her life. A straddler by nature, Hedy finds herself doing a balancing act on all fronts as her daughter approaches womanhood, her father enters a no-man's-land of bewilderment after a stroke, and her husband departs in search of the lost athletic glory of his youth. At the same time, the divisive political issues of the greater world--the Gulf War, abortion, gay rights, and fundamentalism--encroach on Hedy's increasingly fragile private one. As the tensions mount, Hedy learns to take a side--her own side--for the first time in her life, reawakening to a sense of love and loss.