
I found out my family thought I was pathetic in the most American way possible: standing barefoot in our suburban…

The sound that always comes back to me isn’t the insult. It’s the pause. Forks stopped halfway to mouths. Glasses…

“How does it feel to be useless, son?” My mom said it loud enough to rattle the fake crystal chandelier…

My nephew was still laughing when the plastic hot dog flag slid off its toothpick and fell into the ketchup….

The screaming started over a laptop the size of a pizza box. It sat on my parents’ coffee table wrapped…

I was standing in my tiny office kitchen, waiting for the microwave to finish humming over my leftovers, when I…

Last Friday afternoon, there was a red, white, and blue flag magnet crooked on my fridge, a sweating glass of…

I was thirty-two years old and trying not to crush a flimsy plastic cup of Costco champagne when my father…

The first thing I saw when I stepped into the kitchen was the dish towel in my mother’s hands and…

On the night I turned eighteen, the string lights in our Austin backyard glowed like they were strung for…

The night my mother told me not to expect anything from her, the house smelled like roast chicken and lemon…

I was halfway up the back steps of our lake house when I heard my daughter laugh with a stranger…

My daughter gave me a free vacation for her friend’s wedding, and for a few hours I convinced myself it…

The first thing I saw when I sat down at the Christmas table was the little American flag magnet on…

I heard the chandelier before I heard her voice. The crystals clicked together every time someone shifted at the table,…

The night my family tried to turn my life into their personal credit card, there was a little American flag…

Two days after my wedding, I was sitting at the little wood table in our one-bedroom apartment, the same table…

My graduation tassel lay curled on the passenger seat of my car like a tiny question mark, the gold thread…

My name echoed through the university arena, sharp against the floodlights, as I walked across that stage expecting—hoping—to see them….

When my sister raised her wineglass and said the words, the room reacted before my brain could. ‘Well,’ Avery…