“‘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”

of the gap. Her own family in Northern Virginia who were proud of her Navy career in the general way that families are proud of things they don’t understand, without being able to see anything specific about what that pride was attached to.

She had long since made peace with the gap. Or not peace exactly. More like a working arrangement.

She said, before continue reading …