Over forty years ago, my father's brother and his wife, lifelong Presbyterians from New Jersey, adopted three Inuit siblings from Canada. It may have been three Eskimo siblings from Alaska, but the details were something woven into my childhood, as were the lives of my three older cousins Carol, Larry, and Vernon. We saw each other each Christmas and Easter, and spent a week every summer in a rambling, salt-crusted house on the Jersey shore.
Over the years, it became clear the my aunt and uncle had a difficult, and charged relationship with their adopted kids. Carol, the eldest, fought haggard and shrill with Aunt Betty; one year, when we visited, Carol showed my older sister and I her room. The walls were covered in an angry scrawl of red and black permanent marker, a list in Betty's handwriting of the many, many things that Carol did wrong. Two years later, we visited Carol at a short-stay mental retreat at the end of a long line of evergreen trees. She was quieter, then, duller. We took her to a silver-clad deli for an awkward lunch.
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