“‘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”
She used to say it at the dinner table when I was 10, 11, 12 years old, the way you might state the weather: Diana is going to be an attorney. Not Diana wants to be, or Diana’s thinking about it. Just she is, present tense, already decided.
My job was to grow into the sentence she had written for me.
