Jack tries to have a perfect picnic with his mother, but things do not turn out as they expected.

Follows the emotions of a young boy as he waits at an airport for a family member to return home from serving in the military.

The residents of Hard Pan, California, come together to help Brigitte and Lucky when the County Health Department threatens to close down the café, and meantime Miles's life is complicated by his mother's return.

When Marcus's mother has chemotherapy for her cancer and loses her hair, he tries to find new hair for her to make her well again.

As two Takunami youths approach their thirteenth birthdays, Luka reaches the culmination of his mother's training for the tribe's manhood test while Tirio, raised in Miami, Florida, by his adoptive mother, feels called to begin preparations to prove himself during his upcoming visit to the Amazon rain forest where he was born.

"A prayer from mother to son that he will always in safe hands"--

Mom has a gift for Greg, but only after he guesses what it is from the strange clues she gives him.

Maverick Falconer is just starting middle school and he wishes he were a hero like his father because maybe then he could deal with his mother's drinking and series of abusive boyfriends, not to mention the kids who bully him in middle school (pretty much the same ones who bullied him in elementary school)--but as the year passes he begins to realize that other kids have problems too, and maybe if they can all survive sixth-grade things will get better....

Rudy and his mother spend the day cleaning the house.