It was a standard if not cliché motel bathroom, and Mom had been in there a while. In August of 2001, we’d found ourselves at a Days Inn for the weekend—Mom, my sister, and I—despite her losing custody of us six years prior. We were one hour outside of Pittsburgh, in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, though home was even farther, just over five hours east, in South Jersey.  The Rolling Rock Town Fair was a grungy music festival headlined that year by the Stone Temple Pilots, Live, the Deftones, and Incubus. It was rumored to be a kind of nineties alternative Woodstock…

Marin County 1992  From the couch, my parents give me their full, undivided attention. Dr. Groszmann arranges her thick blonde hair in front of each shoulder, crosses one leg over the other.  She nods from her armchair, gives me her you-can-do-this expression. I shuffle three pages of notes, hands trembling. Eyeing the cassette recorder to make sure it is revolving, I take a deep breath as if perched on the high board. “The main thing I want to discuss today is my sexuality. It’s something I’m sure we all know but we never talk about, and that’s that I’m gay.” …

They Say Ten years ago, I married a sailor. They say sailors swear a lot, but my husband barely does. Actually, he’s kind of a disappointment in that area. I can swear him under the table, usually within the first few minutes of watching a football game. And as far as being drunken, my sailor rarely is. I think it’s because he was drunken a lot in college, and a lot after that. Still, we keep a healthy supply of rum on hand and limes to fend off scurvy.  My sailor is superstitious. They say you should never leave port…

He nearly killed us just after our eleventh anniversary. Glossy pages of the wedding gift guides call it the steel year. A shiny alloy of carbon and iron, strong yet malleable, what makes the bones of buildings, supports bridges, and for many years, served as the exoskeleton of automobiles. My partner and I had orbited the Chevy Malibu in the summer heat of the cracked Hertz parking lot that morning, inspecting for the slightest dent in the reflection of the overcast sky. The pen scraped the contract we confidently signed. The vehicle would shuttle us from Maryland to California. Neither…

To be fair, I made the mistake of standing too close to the kitchen island and hovering over the charcuterie spread. With my shoulders slouched and arms wide, I looked like a vulture protecting fresh roadkill that it had paid too much for at Whole Foods. Everyone knows that the safest place at a party—especially one where you only know half the guests but everyone is willing to have sex with you anyway—is next to the food. This way, you meet new people, but have something on hand to shove into your mouth if the conversation dies or takes an…

Archaeology: A- When I was eight, my mother, father, three older siblings, and I took a family portrait and hung it above the piano in our dining room. The piano belonged to my father’s father, but none of us could play it, nor did my parents see investing in lessons as worthwhile. Eventually, we sold the piano, but the photo remained there, an artifact of our proximity. In it, my mother and father sit next to each other, surrounded by their four children. My sister sits next to my mother and one brother stands between them. My other brother—the oldest…

Photo by Amanda Witherell The awful is inside the normal. Like normal is pregnant with awful. —Brian Doyle, “Everyone Thinks that Awful Comes by Itself, But It Doesn’t” April 4, 2017  Fanning Island rises into view slow as the morning sun—just a low, green strip of palms with a thin gap near the center. We steer our sailboat for the gap. A couple of church steeples and spindly radio antennas pierce the canopy. A man in a rough-hewn canoe anchored just off the island, fishing, waves a long, brown welcoming arm. Brian and I haven’t seen another boat or human…