“‘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”

in summer without planning it, just drifting there the way water finds its level.

Our best talks happened on that porch in the summer evenings when Richmond went soft and the fireflies came out over the backyard. Cassidy would talk about whatever she was thinking—boys she liked, things she’d seen at school, something funny a friend had said. I would continue reading …