“‘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”

dinners. At dinners, the preamble was protective, a buffer between people who needed time to remember how to be in a room together.

This was more like two people running through a checklist before they said the thing they had come to say, confirming that basic operations were functional before attempting something more complex.

When she said she had continue reading …