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

I didn’t ogle girls. I noticed pretty ones and thought of how I would look in this or that outfit and had fun in trips to the Mall with friends and my Mom, trying on stuff and thumbs-upping/thumbs-downing what they tried on. But, you know, I never ached to be with a woman either.


I was hopeless but I did not feel incomplete. I was busy with other things, real things. There’d be time enough once my career was blooming to take the long view. And my Mom never pushed me. She well knew the pitfalls of a rocky marriage. I mean, she told me that it had not always been bad but that it was a gradual thing and suddenly the both of them realized that it had become bad and would never get better. So, the booze was their shared pain-killer until she was faced with using it alone and decided she wouldn’t, couldn’t do that.


Chapter 21