I got an e-mail from my brother this week that said, “Call me,” and it turned out he just wanted to talk. We hadn’t for awhile, so we caught up, and then I caught up with my sister-in-law and then talked some more with my brother, and we all laughed a lot. Jack confessed he’d never read one of my books. He said, “I don’t want to read my sister talking about sex.” I laughed and told him that I’d never named a hero Jack and I never would (both my brother and my dad were named Jack) for a similar reason. We talked about things that happened during our childhood and we both remembered different things that the other had no recollection of, and we laughed about that, too. I told him the new book had the tagline, “Would it kill you to go see your mother?” and he laughed hard at that, and then I told him the mother in the book collected bears and he laughed even harder (our mother was nuts for teddy bears and Christmas tree pins and also just nuts in general).

What made me really happy this week is that I love my brother and he loves me and we say it. And also he married a darling woman who’s more like my sister than my sister-in-law, and I love her, too.

What made you happy this week?