“‘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”
that would complete something she had started and set down.
I didn’t resent it when I was young. I just wore it. I was good at wearing it, good at school, good at getting the grades, good at being the daughter whose name could be dropped at dinner parties as evidence that the Cross family had something going in the right direction.
