The crowded Cape Cod house is bursting with seven people sharing a single toilet. Rocky directs Jamie to hang up wet towels while her mother dotes on Chicken the cat, refusing to get a new one for fear Mort will trip and because she worries about who will care for it after they die. Mort, suffering sciatica, lies down. Maya and Willa flip through real estate listings on the couch; Maya looks queasy but Rocky leaves her alone, mindful of her hidden pregnancy. Nick returns with dinner supplies and flirts with Rocky in the kitchen.

Maya and Jamie sneak off to smoke a joint in the woods, and Rocky's mother smells it and complains. Willa redirects her grandmother to the real estate circular while Mort emerges and they all gather for wine and appetizers. Willa, recently interested in her ancestry through a DNA test, asks Mort about his Polish family. He explains his father and aunts came to Ellis Island as children in the 1920s, while his grandparents stayed behind and died in Poland in 1942.

When Willa asks why both grandparents died the same year, Mort matter-of-factly answers: "At Treblinka," the extermination camp. Rocky is stunned—she insists she never knew this, having been told her whole life that nobody knew how they died. She accuses her father of keeping a secret; he insists it wasn't a secret, just something she should have inferred. Rocky has a hot flash amid the comfort of Nick, her mother, and Willa, who gently points out that Mort is sharing something about himself, not about Rocky.

Rocky apologizes and asks Mort to share more. After dinner—pan-roasted striper, corn, pasta, tomatoes—the family lingers outside by candlelight. Mort recounts how his family received no word from Poland, only silence, then perhaps a 1944 or 1945 letter from neighbors deported to Siberia who had seen his grandparents loaded onto a freight car. He recalls his father crying out a sound he never heard again. The family never spoke of it afterward, weighed down by survivors' guilt and shame.

Mort reflects that living Jews have always been the survivors, going back before the camps. Willa wonders if that's why Rocky hated summer camp. Mort denies feeling haunted—life went on, they were safe, they ate. He concludes it is a privilege to grow old. Rocky cries, overwhelmed by devastation and blessing, picturing herself balanced at the fulcrum of a seesaw between her living parents and her living children, with Nick beside her.