“‘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”

face matched to a name.

She got to me last.

She smiled at the table in the way of someone delivering a line they have delivered many times.

“And this is Diana,” she said. “Our oldest. She left UVA her sophomore year, so she’s the family dropout.”

The small communal chuckle that moved around the table was not cruel. It had never been cruel. It was just continue reading …