“‘This is Diana—our family dropout,’ my mother said for the fifteenth Thanksgiving in a row, but when my sister’s new husband reached across the table to shake my hand, his grip locked, his face went still, and the room forgot how to laugh before he said the two words nobody there was prepared to hear”

had been aimed at me. Diana should come home. Diana should explain herself. Diana should stop making things difficult.

This was the first time I could remember someone pointing it somewhere else.

I drove home that night thinking about what 15 years of the other kind of should accumulates to, and what it costs, and what it might look like to live without continue reading …