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 took more than my fair share of finger-food and after another hour or so Kerry and I were on the subway heading up to the train station, and we sat quietly once on board.


“Sweetie,” Kerry said with my head on her shoulder, “I’ve suffered from loving you for nearly two years and that’s not going to change. You know that don’t you?”


“And you know how happy you make me and how lucky I am that you love me, don’t you.”


“No sweetie. You’re the hot one. I’m the lucky one.”


“Well, you are pretty smart so you must be right.”


“It’s good to know you’re at least smart enough to understand that,” she said, which drew a light slap on her leg from my free hand.


A bit later, I asked Kerry about a photo in Carol and Rachel’s bedroom. It was of a striking Asian woman in a Hopkins shirt, taken in what I recognized as Sausalito. I recalled a more-formal picture of her on a bookshelf in Carol’s office.


Chapter 57