Suzanne Nelson was raised just outside of San Francisco. A Stanford grad and varsity runner, she heads to New York City for law school. She is gay, but has come out to no one. In New York she meets Kerry Neally, a New Yorker and fellow student. Who is straight. First in a study group and then as a pair, they find themselves become attached to one another. And have to work out that Kerry thinks she's straight. Eileen is Kerry's mother. She is a widow, and meeting Suzanne helps her leave the shell into which she placed herself after her husband died. And she comes to the attention of two men. One a widower. The other divorced. And love intevenes for her choice. With Suzanne settled into her New York life, she turns her back on her parents, who turned their backs on Suzanne's aunt Mary, a gay woman disowned by her parents and brother decades before. She, too, lives in New York and she and Eileen attempt to get Suzanne's parents to understand their daughter. Kate Nelson comes to New York to reason with her daughter. As eventually does William, her father. The story is about how the members of what becomes a large New York family deal with themselves, each other, and love.

The Neallys

She was smart, of course, and she did not have a mean bone in her body. She had, as Jane Austen observed of Anne Elliot, “elegance of mind and sweetness of character.” While some assholes would view a professor grilling a student the way a Roman viewed a lion approaching a Christian, hoping for the latter’s painful demise, you could sense Suze cringing and quietly giving a sigh of relief when the student survived or a frown when she did not. Doing, thinking, anything else simply would not occur to her.


I sometimes embarrassed myself when I was not as sympathetic or empathetic as she expected me to be. I soon realized that she was uncomfortable when I sprinkled obscenities in my sentences, and I tried to cut down on it because it made her uncomfortable, as it did my Mom. I took all of this as a sign that she had great expectations for me and I got angry with myself when I felt I disappointed her. And next to my Mom she was suddenly the last person I could ever want to disappoint.


Chapter 7