“‘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”

Sometimes it arrived inside a longer sentence like a clause that was there whether you needed it or not.

But it was always there.

And the people around the table—Aunt Renee, Uncle Frank, various cousins, family friends—would laugh or smile in the particular way of people who have heard the same line enough times that it has become furniture.

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