Christmas is approaching, and
patriarch Jack Armstrong is doing all he can to hold on until Christmas is
over. He is dying from a disease doctors tell him is always fatal. Given mere
months to live, he knows he will never walk his daughter down the wedding
aisle, he won’t send off his middle child to college, and he will long be gone
by the time the youngest graduates from high school. But he is determined to
hang around through Christmas, living on an oxygen line and bedridden. He
catches all the glimpses he can of his family: the love of his life, Lizzie;
their daughter, Mikki, a rebellious 16-year-old who’s not close to her dying
father; son, Cory, a 12-year-old thespian; and son, Jack Jr. (known as Jackie),
who’s 2.
Life throws them a major curveball
when Lizzie dies in a car accident. The parent who everyone expected to be
around suddenly isn’t, and Jack seems mere days away from being gone, too.
Anticipating that the children will soon be orphans, Jack’s mother-in-law,
Bonnie, splits up all three children and puts them with various members of the
maternal side of the family (Jack has no living relatives). Jack is left in
Cleveland to die alone without any family around, much to the dismay of
Bonnie’s husband, Fred, and of course, Jack.
Miraculously, Jack discovers he has
started to breathe on his own again. Soon he’s trying to support his own weight
without anyone’s help. Instead of going to hospice prepared to die, he works up
to going to a rehab facility. His good friend, fellow military man and
co-contracting business owner, Sammy Duvall, helps him train to gain physical
strength back. As soon as he’s discharged, Jack goes to retrieve each of his
kids, starting with Lizzie, who’s with her grandparents in Arizona.
Jack struggles to balance time between
working to support his family as a single parent and actually spending time
with the kids. Sadly, he puts work ahead of the kids and almost misses Jackie’s
birthday. He is reminded of it not-so-gently by Mikki, who clearly thinks he is
failing as a parent. Jack is not even aware that Cory is being bullied at
school until Mikki informs him of that, too.
When Lizzie’s stylish,
eighty-something-year-old grandmother, Cecilia Pinckney, passes away, Jack is
shocked to learn that she has left him the old Pinckney house on the South
Carolina coast. The house is referred to as ‘The Palace,’ and it is where
Lizzie grew up. She had wanted to take the kids there for the summer, and Jack
had never seen it, so in her memory, he packs up the family and heads to South
Carolina. Sammy goes along as well and brings his dog, Sam Jr.
Jack and Sammy find work in the
small beach town, but Jack still struggles to primarily be a dad. He has also
become obsessed with fixing ‘Lizzie’s Lighthouse’ as she had painted on a sign
in her youth. And he has caught the eye of a lawyer-turned-diner-owner named
Jenna Fontaine.
“One Summer” explores the struggle
that the Armstrongs (especially Jack and Mikki) go through to piece their
broken family back together. There will be obstacles for all of them, one of
which is big enough for Jack to wonder if his second chance with his family is
prematurely ending. What will the outcomes be? How can he let go of Lizzie? Can
he learn to love again?
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