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This is a modal window. On the night before Thanksgiving, four wings of the McAuley family gathered at their eight-bedroom cabin in the mountains to make merry. Discreet black sedans rumbled slowly up the long poplar-lined driveway toward the cabin with its distant bright windows, gold-capped acorns and brilliant yellow leaves crunching beneath the tires, and then children tumbled out of back seats gloveless and hatless and scarfless and coatless, laughing at the pure joy of the cold, their newly visible breath dispersing into the strange opacity of this country night. Elsewhere, perhaps, and at another time of year, their parents would have hustled them inside, but at the cabin it didn't matter—at the cabin Grandma McAuley stood waiting in the foyer with a festive apron and hot toddy fixings close at hand, and the adults had no compunctions about letting the cousins play tag in the dark beneath the stars. Liza, almost three, rode on her uncle Paul's shoulders as he told her about the constellations: that one, that's the celestial hot tub! There's the Saint Bernard, there's the giant coffee mug, next to the cosmic mini-fridge, and that's the Golden Gate Bridge. No, Liza said, giggling, hanging on tight as she'd been told, no it's not.

Uncle Paul was broke. He had been broke many times over the course of the last sixteen years and he had never asked his parents for help. He was an accountant, and so his financial circumstances might have made him the butt of some of the family jokes if he hadn't been in debt because he was gay, because he had fallen in love with someone who loved him even more deeply, because his partner had died after several long stints in the hospital, several ambulance rides, more than a few surgeries. Uncle Paul never used to come to Thanksgiving at the cabin in the mountains because his husband had never been invited, but look, the tide has turned! The McAuleys usually go to Stanford and usually pass the bar (and if they don't you'd better believe it's a choice)—the McAuleys own property in Palo Alto and San Francisco and Big Sur and up near Tahoe in the Sierra Nevadas—the McAuleys are prominent, pragmatic Irish-Catholic Democrats and these days the McAuleys are cognizant of the political and social value of a gay son. They'd love to square up Paulie's debts—after all, it's been so long, after all, back then it was a different time, after all it's not like they'll have to see Paulie kissing any man over the hickory ham and so what's the harm of it really?—after all, bygones. Uncle Paul knows his father is waiting in an armchair by the hearth, readying a firm handshake and an earnest laugh and a kindly-stern let's get this straightened out now shall we it's been long enough no I don't want to hear another word about it, and so Uncle Paul is outside with the children, broke.

Later, the children will gather in the long loft with its many bunks and sleeping bags to play Monopoly and make pillow forts and shine flashlights through the webbing of their fingers. The children will take turns sneaking down to the kitchen (on principle rather than out of hunger) and getting caught by Aunt Lane, who tickles without mercy while threatening to string up miscreants by their toenails. Aunt Lane always stays up late to make the pies with a rotating cast of helpers, and tonight Uncle Paul is, with determined constancy, never not up to his elbows in flour and butter and brown sugar. In the living room the other parents and grandparents and in-laws and friends will be catching up, swapping stories, laughing in cashmere, listening to Uncle Royal play...