“‘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”

that children who share a small house become close. Not always in conversation, but in the comfortable shorthand of cohabitation, of growing up alongside each other through the accumulated ordinary moments of a family life. The shared bathroom wars. The back-and-forth over the television remote. The way we always ended up on the back porch after dinner continue reading …