Donna is my older sister. Two years older. And Donna has always, her whole life, believed she got a raw deal. That the world owed her something it kept forgetting to pay.
Some of that came from real places. Our parents weren’t easy, and Donna caught the worst of it, being the first. I’ve tried to remember that over the years, on the days she’s made it hard to love her. But somewhere along the line, Donna’s hurt turned into something else. It turned into a kind of hunger. A need to be the center of every room, to win every contest, to make sure that whatever good thing was happening, it was happening to her.
Weddings were the worst for her. Because Donna was forty-four and had never married, and it wasn’t for lack of trying. There’d been a string of men over the years, and every one of them had ended the same way — with Donna calling me at midnight, furious and heartbroken, explaining how it was all his fault, how she’d been wronged again, how she just couldn’t understand why these things kept happening to her.
