Who Counts as Family

"What's wrong with you boys?" My grandmother believed in honest inspection. At Thanksgiving she once pinched my brother's stomach, held the evidence up for the table, and informed him he was getting fat. No one appealed. The ruling stood, and so did the gravy. Then she turned to the larger problem. Three grandsons, and not one girlfriend among us worth setting a place for. "What's wrong with you boys?" she'd ask, as though we might have a theory. She had a point. My oldest brother held out until nearly thirty. She passed in 2019, and after that, as if she'd been the one holding the door shut, we all went out and found remarkable women. I'm not saying she was the holdup. I'm saying the timing is hard to ignore. That's the first kind of family: blood. I believe in blood the way you believe in a bad knee. It's yours, it predicts the weather, and you can't trade it in. Your siblings are the nearest thing to your own frequency you'll ever get, though growing up I'd have called it static.…

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