Ex-marine Joe Dover comes home in 1946 from the war in the Pacific, marries young, and begins cheating immediately. From marriage to divorce, and again to marriage; from fatherhood to estrangement; from being shot at to an accident on the water, Joe's career is anything but uneventful. Negotiating all dangers with a canny fortitude, he hangs on as best he can to love, to his children, and to life, but in the end, everything may well seem a fluke of contingency.