“‘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”

someone who has been handed the job of smoothing the family’s friction and has long since stopped questioning whether the job should be hers.

“Is she apologizing?” I asked.

“You know how she is,” Cassidy said.

“So that’s a no.”

“Dy, I’m just asking you to come and keep the peace for me.”

I was on the sidewalk walking home from the Pentagon, and the December continue reading …