Free to a Good Home

Mine was a normal enough childhood, as far as we were concerned—“we” being me, my younger, then-bratty sister, Kiley (spelling unofficially changed to Kylie during the Kylie Minogue “Locomotion” years), and my even younger tagalong brother, Dax. I’ve only met one other Dax, and there was a Dax character on Deep Space Nine or one of those Star Trek spinoffs.

I say we thought we were normal because in the country, there’s not a lot of opportunity for comparison. We thought everybody lived on roads like ours—where you were related to everyone on them. And in Mount Pleasant, this was true. Our great-grandmother lived right beside us. Nan Chapin (my mom’s mom) lived farther up the road. Aunts and uncles at the top of the road swapped houses a few