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

And perhaps getting ahead of ourselves, Kate quit her job, began working for the Episcopal Charities in its New York office—it was not a lot but she was being paid—and on January 2, 2019, instructed Karen Novack to file on her behalf a petition for dissolution of marriage in a California c Court. In the end, she and William (through their attorneys) agreed to a fifty-fifty split of their assets, after an agreed-upon third-party appraised the non-financial assets, with a trust established to pay for Eric’s remaining years at Yale and three years of grad school for him.


Chapter 70