My sister’s new boyfriend shook my hand like he was trying to crack a walnut.

He held on a second too long and squeezed a little too hard. While he did it, he looked me up and down, from my flannel shirt to my work boots and back up again, the way you’d look at a used car you had no intention of buying.

“And you must be the little brother,” he said.

Not Zach. Not “Nice to meet you.” The little brother.

His smile was about sixty percent teeth and zero percent warmth.

“Paige has told me all about you, buddy.”

Buddy. He called me buddy. Before the night was over he would call me buddy at least fifteen times, and every time it landed the way you’d talk to a golden retriever that had just learned to shake.

“I’m Graham,” he added. “Not Gray. Not G. Graham.”

He told me that within the first thirty seconds of meeting me. Looking back, it should have been my first clue that this Thanksgiving was going to be a special kind of awful.

He had walked into my parents’ house wearing a navy sport coat with a pocket square. Everybody else was in jeans and sweaters. My dad was in a Washington Commanders sweatshirt with a hole in the elbow. Graham came in holding a bottle of wine up like a trophy and went straight to my mother.

“Mrs. Hollis, a Willamette Valley Pinot Noir. 2018 vintage. Quite lovely on the palate.”

My mom, bless her heart, took the bottle, looked at it, and said, “Oh, that’s nice, honey. We’ve got Bud Light in the cooler if you want something cold.”