“‘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”

whose names I always had to reconstruct, were near the fireplace.

Cassidy came around the corner from the kitchen and hugged me genuinely, if carefully. The hug of two people who have been strangers for a while and are pretending not to notice.

“Come meet Ethan,” she said. “Eight months married and this is the first time.”

I said, “You were in a desert.continue reading …