and a laugh that came out of him slowly, like he was surprised by it.
He was kind. That was the thing everybody noticed first. He was kind to waitresses and kind to children and kind to my mother, who talks too much, and kind to my father, who talks too little.
The first time he came to a family dinner, he spent twenty minutes in the garage with my dad looking at birdhouses. Nobody else ever looked at the birdhouses.
“That’s a good man,” my father said to me afterward. Just that. But my father doesn’t say things
like that about anyone.
And Tom loved Rachel. You could see it in the way he looked at her. Like she was the sun and he was just grateful to stand in the light.
They got engaged after eight months. They got married a year after that, in a big white tent in Tom’s parents’ backyard, with twinkle lights and a band and a three-tier cake.
At the wedding, I watched Rachel walk down the aisle in her white dress, and I felt something I
hadn’t felt in a long time.
Relief.
My sister had her own husband now. Her own life. Her own house, a pretty two-story colonial that
