“‘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”

into a duffel bag. She was 17 and three-quarters and had the particular expression teenagers wear when something enormous is happening and they lack the vocabulary to enter it.

“Are you sure?” she said.

I zipped the bag. “Yeah.”

She nodded. She didn’t fight it, but she didn’t follow me down the stairs either. And I could feel the gap opening between us continue reading …