The Last Chairlift

43. A BOHEMIAN LIFESTYLE

There is no explaining certain things, not only the ghosts. It’s a mystery to me why I missed the ghosts—except for the diaper man. When I moved to Vermont, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a ghost. I would have welcomed that woman with the baby carriage—the one who made me think she could have shot me, if she wanted to. If she’d ever had her shotgun with her, when she appeared. But even she didn’t show up anymore. She’d never been credible as a ghost. Even my verifiable ghosts had gone away; with their departure, the story of my life was diminished. Without the ghosts, my life had lost its plot. I missed them.

Speaking of plot, now that I knew who my father was, there wasn’t much to keep his story going forward—the momentum was gone. What had been the main event of my life, so far, turned out to be an underage boy. “He was just some kid, sweetie—he wasn’t shaving. He was just a boy who couldn’t take his eyes off me,” my mom had told me. “He was small,” she’d whispered, kissing me. “He would have been a pretty girl.”

Finding out that Paul Goode was my father felt like an anticlimax to me. And I wasn’t supposed to talk about him? I couldn’t tell anyone who my father was, because he’d been underage. “That sucks,” as Nora was known to say.

“We should keep this business about who your father is to ourselves, Kid,” Molly more succinctly put it. We didn’t want my mother to go to jail—or lose her job, teaching underage kids to ski.

Em echoed what Molly told me. “Nothing has changed because you know who your father is, except you know where your writer gene comes from,” Em wrote me. Although I missed her when I moved to Vermont, I never wanted to see Em pantomime where my writer gene came from. Yet the past is everlasting. I imagined I would always hear Em’s orgasm, from a distance.

“You were the wrong age to hear Em’s orgasms,” my mom had recently reminded me, “but you should try to stop thinking about it—it’s just not realistic for you to think about Em in that way, sweetie.” I should have listened to my mother, but not on the subject of Em’s orgasm. What was not realistic, for a fiction writer, was for me to imagine I could ever stop thinking about Em in that way. And to think I used to wonder what it would be like to hear Em’s orgasm firsthand. It might make you deaf, or otherwise cause permanent damage.

I do not believe I should have listened to my mom about everything, although I take to heart her “every creature wants to have a normal life—even an octopus!” In the context of how I’d hurt the feelings of people I loved, my mother was right to criticize me.

Yet what I really should have listened to my mother about were the lies of omission. So what if she was a hypocrite? As Nora knew, my mom was an authority on the subject of lies of omission; on that subject, like skiing, my mother knew what she was talking about. “You can’t hide things or keep secrets from Grace—you have to tell her everything,” my mom had told me.

“We didn’t tell Adam we were more than friends, did we?” Molly had asked her. “We didn’t tell him everything, Ray.”

“We were going to tell you, sweetie,” my mom had responded. There was no lasting acrimony, but what was lost in our conversation was my mother’s advice. And then there was the underage business; to protect my mom, Molly and I (not to mention Little Ray herself) were disinclined to tell Grace everything. We were all okay about keeping my family history a secret from Grace.

There would be no follow-through to all the talk about lies of omission. As of Christmas Day, 1989, I still hadn’t met Grace; I was beginning to wonder if my mother had changed her mind about my meeting her. I hadn’t even gone skiing with my mom, as if she’d changed her mind about skiing with me, too. “What are you waiting for, Ray?” Molly asked. “Are you waiting for the week between Christmas and New Year’s, when so many assholes are on skis that Adam will surely be struck and killed by an asshole skiing out of control?”

“Smarty-pants, Molly,” my mother said, not answering the question.

I didn’t delay in renting the spec house off West Road in Manchester, nor did my mom and Molly delay in furnishing it. They went overboard; the spec house had three bedrooms, and all the beds were in place before I even moved in. I found out, only after the fact, that the snowshoer was helping to pay for it. The death of the little Barlows was a windfall for Elliot, who’d been very generous to my mother—sharing with her the writing team’s royalties and the profits from their properties in Austria.

“What a breadwinner Mr. Barlow has turned out to be—I couldn’t have asked for a better husband!” my mom was fond of declaring.

And I couldn’t have asked for a better father, I would always think—while the furniture kept coming to the spec house. Every two or three days, a new piece would show up. There were two hutches, but I had only one dining room, and the second hutch was even bigger than the first one—a giant cupboard or dresser, with open shelves above. I had the deliverymen put the huge hutch in one of the bedrooms—a guest bedroom, I was calling it. I knew Molly had to restrain my mother from buying a fourth bed. “This furniture isn’t just for the spec house, sweetie—you’ll need more than three bedrooms one day,” my mom assured me.

I knew, of course, she meant the house I would one day build on the uphill piece of land I’d just bought in East Dorset. It was uphill, all right. Molly and I had walked around up there, in the knee-deep snow. “The land is a deal, Kid—you can always resell it,” Molly said. I’d made an offer on the land, which had been instantly accepted. My mother had already been talking to a local contractor; I’d seen the drawings. I asked Molly why my mom believed I would one day need more than three bedrooms. “You should ask your mom yourself, Kid, but I can tell you how she does the math,” Molly said. “There’s the master bedroom, for you and Grace, and adjacent to it would be the baby’s room—for the baby you’re going to have as fast as humanly possible. But the baby’s room would become Grace’s dressing room as soon as the baby is old enough to have a room of its own, and that’ll leave you without a guest bedroom.”

“So I need four bedrooms, just to have one bedroom left over for guests?” I asked Molly.

“You’re opening a can of worms, Kid, but your mom thinks you need five bedrooms—she says your kind of extended family needs more than one guest bedroom,” the trail groomer told me.

“Extended to whom?” I asked.

“To be fair, Kid, your mom didn’t name names,” Molly said.

As it turned out, I could actually make use of the two guest bedrooms I had in the spec house—Em and the snowshoer came to stay with me for Christmas. Given Em’s proclivity for nighttime traveling to the accessible bedrooms, the surplus furniture presented a hazard. Even armed with a flashlight, Em stubbed her toe on a chair in the upstairs hall, she banged her knee on the giant hutch—a formidable obstacle in her guest bedroom—and she walked into a tall armoire in Elliot Barlow’s guest bedroom, scraping her shoulder.

For Christmas Eve dinner, Mr. Barlow made her beloved stuffed peppers. Molly and my mother came to dinner. I had a much bigger dining-room table in the spec house than the one Molly and my mom had; that was when Molly saw I had a bigger oven, too. Molly decided she should roast the turkey for our Christmas Day dinner in my kitchen; the snowshoer applauded this idea, because we could take turns basting the turkey. And on Christmas Day, Em entertained us with a funny pantomime enacting her furniture injuries, showing us the damage she’d incurred in her bedroom wanders: her swollen big toe, her scraped shoulder, her bruised knee. It’s true that we saw Em’s bra, and part of one breast when she showed us her shoulder, and Em just dropped her jeans when she showed us her knee. I knew when my mom was only pretending to laugh; I could tell she was inwardly seething. When she got me alone—I was basting the turkey—my mother cautioned me along these lines. “An outsider to our family, such as Grace, might misunderstand the unusual houseguest behavior of someone like Em, sweetie,” my mom said.

“What are you saying, exactly?” I asked my mother.

It discomfited me to hear her say that Grace came from a conventional family—even more so, to hear that Grace sought to have such a family for herself. Yet I was unprepared to hear what my mother had to say about Em. “It’s weird enough, sweetie, that Em is unable or unwilling to speak, and her pantomiming doesn’t work so well offstage. Em needed Nora to be understandable, sweetie. But what really wouldn’t work for Grace is Em’s nocturnal wanderings—I know Em isn’t sleeping around, sweetie, but Grace might misunderstand what looks like bed-hopping. If you know what I mean,” my mom said.

After Christmas Day dinner, when Molly and my mom had gone home—and Em had gone to bed, alone, or she was starting out that way—the snowshoer and I did the dishes. I asked Elliot Barlow what she made of my mom’s micromanaging of my meeting Grace. “You know your mother, Adam—she just doesn’t want Grace to think you’re one of those older writers who has been living a bohemian lifestyle,” Mr. Barlow said.

“But haven’t we all been living a bohemian lifestyle?” I asked the little English teacher, who just laughed. I should have considered the trans woman I was doing the dishes with. The snowshoer knew all there was to know about Little Ray’s propensity for micromanaging. We both loved her, but we knew it was impossible to change her. That Christmas night, when Em wandered into my bedroom and got in bed with me, she just hugged me for a long time before she fell asleep; when I woke up, Em had moved on. I would lie awake thinking a bohemian lifestyle was a desirable way to live, but now I was destined to try living a different way.

I hadn’t even met Grace, but I’d started to wring my hands again. I had stopped for a long time, but now that I had resumed, everyone noticed.

“I used to wring my hands, too, sweetie, but I stopped—around the time I stopped competing as a skier,” my mother told me, out of the blue; it was the first I’d heard of her wringing her hands. There was no end to my mom’s secrets, as Nora was known to say.

I just looked at Molly, who was laughing. “News to me, too, Kid,” the trail groomer told me.

The snowshoer said she’d not seen me wring my hands since that time in the Zimmermanns’ Park Avenue apartment, after Zim’s memorial service, when Zim’s fiancée—Francine DeCourcey, of New York and Paris—noticed me wringing my hands. Zim had probably told her about my damaged hands, my 4-F trigger finger. She knew my hands had been my ticket out of Vietnam.

“Give me your hands,” Francine said to me, after she made me sit beside her. “If Matthew had your hands…” she started to say, her voice just stopping. “I could have loved him, if he had your hands,” she told me a little later, when she reached again for my hands, wishing they were Zim’s.

I hadn’t wrung my hands for more than twenty years, but Mr. Barlow and I didn’t believe I’d stopped wringing them because of my brief contact with Francine DeCourcey. Em was more interested in why my hand-wringing started up again. Em had stopped writing to me. I missed her writing me, but the little English teacher told me that third person was the voice Em should be writing in. Right now, it was better for Em when her voice was omniscient—a far cry from Em’s first-person shtick as a pantomimist, or her letter-writing voice. I knew I would just have to wait for Em to write me again, or perhaps I could persuade her to write me in the third person.

Even if she wasn’t writing me about it, I knew what Em thought about my hand-wringing making a comeback. I knew Em hadn’t changed her mind about my walking into an arranged marriage. Elliot Barlow and I were familiar with Em’s pantomime signifying a pending disaster. In Em’s mind, my meeting Grace signified everything that was pending for me. It was no wonder I was wringing my hands again, in Em’s opinion. If Little Ray had wrung her hands and stopped, my hand-wringing—not to mention my stopping for more than twenty years—was genetic. Given Em’s parents, and their effect on Em’s refusal to speak, it was understandable to me that Em was obsessed with inherited characteristics. Yet the snowshoer said the bad dad’s letters to Cardinal O’Connor seemed to help Em control her animosity toward His Eminence.

I remembered how the kindly policewoman had recommended getting rid of the letters, or putting the letters in the hands of someone at the archdiocese and just walking away. To my surprise, and Mr. Barlow’s, Em had followed the second part of the policewoman’s advice. With the snowshoer’s help, Em took the letters—not in a box, just tied with some string—to the Archdiocese of New York, leaving the stack of pages with a secretary, or with someone in charge. The little English teacher had done the talking. These were the letters of a dying man who hoped to be baptized by and receive Communion from Cardinal O’Connor, the snowshoer had explained to the secretary. Indicating Em as the dying dad’s daughter, with Em nodding her head off, Elliot Barlow assured the secretary that Em didn’t expect the cardinal to grant her father’s wish. Em knew the archbishop of New York was too busy to baptize her father. Em knew her dad was a crackpot. Em only wished that someone in the archdiocese would acknowledge receipt of the letters and send her a note.

I knew Em’s dad had died; I didn’t suppose a note from someone in the archdiocese had shown up before her father’s death. This didn’t matter to Em, the snowshoer said. The return address on the letters to Cardinal O’Connor was the one on Shaftesbury Avenue, the Toronto property Em had inherited from her father; Em had crossed out the Toronto address on every letter. Elliot Barlow gave her East Sixty-fourth Street address to the person in charge at the archdiocese. Em seemed content to know that she would hear from the archdiocese, eventually.

“So what makes you think Em can control her animosity toward Cardinal O’Connor?” I asked Elliot Barlow.

“You know those things Em sometimes writes on the grocery list,” the snowshoer said.

“You mean those things she writes that aren’t groceries,” I said.

“Precisely. Those things,” Mr. Barlow said.

There was no mistaking Em’s handwriting, even on a grocery list. When Em and I were living with Elliot in the pied-à-terre on East Sixty-fourth Street, the grocery list was always a work in progress under a magnet on the fridge. If I saw the snowshoer had put granola on the list, I might add, “Not that shit with the dried blueberries.”

Em might come along and write, “Or the stuff with the organic almonds that break your teeth.” This was not what Mr. Barlow and I meant about those things Em wrote on the list.

There were those times when Em would come along and use the grocery list as a forum for what she had to say—whatever happened to be on her mind, as a nonspeaking person who had her own ideas, but who didn’t feel like writing you at the moment. In Em’s mind, a grocery list was a message board; everyone saw your grocery list. My mother and Molly put their grocery list on the fridge, too. When I moved into the spec house in Manchester, my mom brought me some magnets for my fridge.

The snowshoer and I laughed about the time Em added a treatise to our small grocery list at the pied-à-terre. A longtime longhand woman, Em’s incisive comments on our shopping list were meticulously punctuated. After the tea bags and the coffee beans, and the pork tenderloin with a question mark, Em had posed a pro-choice manifesto.

“In 1980, the right-to-lifers took control of the Republican Party’s platform committee. Pro-life people, who sacralize the fetus, are the same people who generally oppose any meaningful welfare for unwanted children and unmarried mothers,” Em wrote.

“At first, I thought this was Em’s response to my asking about the pork tenderloin,” the snowshoer said.

“What did Em put on your grocery list about Cardinal O’Connor?” I asked Elliot. It’s a good thing there were only tea bags on the list, I’d been told; there was enough room for what Em had to say.

“It’s not okay that Cardinal O’Connor is on the wrong side of a woman’s right to choose an abortion, but the cardinal is just a lackey representing the Catholic hierarchy,” Em began. “You can’t hold His Eminence accountable, when what you’re up against is a doctrine,” Em went on—she was now writing on the other side of the shopping list. “And you can’t blame the good Catholics who go to Mass, because they believe in something—not even if His Eminence is a doctrinaire son of a bitch who is servile to the Catholic hierarchy!” Em wrote on Mr. Barlow’s grocery list.

“You can see why the third-person omniscient voice is a safer voice for Em to be in,” the snowshoer said.

I agreed with Elliot Barlow: Em’s writing was what would save her—the more all-knowing and somewhat detached, the better. No more threatening to burn down St. Patrick’s Cathedral, not even if Cardinal O’Connor was a doctrinaire son of a bitch. Mr. Barlow and I didn’t doubt that His Eminence was just a lackey, but the snowshoer was keeping her focus on Em as a rescue job.

Before they went back to New York, I showed Elliot and Em the uphill piece of land I’d bought off Dorset Hill Road. The little English teacher and I put our snowshoes on so that we could circle the perimeter of the property, but Em just flailed around in the hip-deep snow. I’d shown both of them the drawings of the house a local contractor had made, but there wasn’t even a driveway off the access road. Among the trees and in all the snow, it was anybody’s guess where the five bedrooms might be. This didn’t deter Em from tramping all around and making five snow angels where she thought the bedrooms ought to go. The snowshoer and I didn’t discourage her, although Em’s snow angels were so far apart that they covered two acres—a bigger house than the local contractor was proposing to build for me. Em didn’t have the best outdoor winter wear; her clothes got wet in the snow, and she was shivering with cold when we drove her back to the spec house for a hot bath.

Em revived, and her teeth stopped chattering, by the time I took her and Elliot to dinner at Molly and my mother’s house in Manchester, where Molly made a lamb chili. I could sense that the night groomer and my mom weren’t seeing eye to eye about something.

“The problem with men…” my mother was saying; she paused, to make sure she had everyone’s attention. “The problem with men is that most of them get married before they’re ready,” my mom said; she was looking at Molly, expecting an argument, but the ski patroller just stirred her chili.

The snowshoer was wary, saying nothing; Mr. Barlow must have been down this road with Little Ray before. Em was nodding her head off; maybe Em didn’t need to know the context of this conversation, or Em believed most men did everything before they were ready.

My mother suddenly embraced Elliot Barlow; all five feet two of Little Ray just hugged all four feet nine of Mr. Barlow. The snowshoer’s face was pressed against my mom’s breasts. “You were so ready to be married, perhaps because you were always a woman,” my mother told the little English teacher. “You are the perfect husband for me, and the readiest man I ever met!” my mom declared. We could see that Elliot Barlow found it hard to breathe against my mother’s breasts.

“I’ll bet I was the smallest, if not the readiest, Ray,” the snowshoer managed to say. Everyone laughed, Em and Molly included.

“I’ve told you, Kid—you know what I’m going to say,” the trail groomer said. “I’ll bet you your mom and the snowshoer last the longest—I’m betting they go the distance.” Everyone cheered—even Em let out a holler. But the way Molly kept looking at my mom, I knew something was amiss. The snowshoer sensed it, too.

“Is there a context we’re not getting, a married man who’s behaving badly—is this about the new Paul Goode business?” the little English teacher asked. She asked the question pensively, with a far-off look; I couldn’t tell if she was asking Molly or my mother.

“That’s all it should be about, the new Paul Goode business,” Molly answered Elliot. “Let it be, Ray—this is a good place to stop, to just let it be,” the trail groomer told my mom.

“Smarty-pants, Molly,” my mother said.

The French media had been rife with rumors about Paul Goode and his French co-star in the Argonne Forest war movie, Argonne—a World War I film that had finished shooting in the northeast of France; the movie was now in postproduction. A salacious story was going around, a scandal in the making. Some journalists were cynical about the truth of the story; it could be a marketing ploy. But the French journalists were taking the story seriously; a room-service waiter in a French hotel had captured Paul Goode and Juliette Leblanc on videotape.

Em sashayed around in a sexy way whenever Juliette Leblanc was mentioned. In my mom and Molly’s kitchen, Em put two tangerines in her bra to make her boobs bigger. We understood that Em was doing her Juliette Leblanc imitation; Juliette was an ooh-la-la, va-va-voom kind of girl. Argonne was a black-and-white film, in French with English subtitles—not up to Paul Goode’s kind of commercial expectations. Maybe the marketing mavens had had a hand in videotaping Paul Goode and Juliette Leblanc having breakfast in bed in their hotel; even with Paul Goode in it, a black-and-white movie with subtitles needed all the publicity it could get. Argonne would be in theaters in early 1990. “A film like that won’t be in Manchester for two or three years, if ever,” Molly said. In France, there was more interest in when the surreptitious videotape would be shown than there was in the theatrical release of Argonne. Paul Goode had finished shooting another new film, with his wife.

Unless there was a mystery guest coming to dinner, we were all in agreement that my philandering father was the epitome of the problem with men—as my mom had put it. Paul Goode wasn’t ready to settle down and keep his pecker in his pants. Everyone sympathized with the wronged wife, Clara Swift, at home with her and Paul Goode’s son—while my dad had been dipping his wick with Juliette Leblanc in France. As for Paul Goode and Clara Swift’s kid, we took a guess at how old the boy would be—when the incriminating videotape was being shown, everywhere and all the time, when Argonne was playing or had already played in most movie theaters, though not yet playing in Manchester. We guessed the boy would be thirteen, old enough to know what was going on, young enough to be devastated by it. Our sympathies, surely, were with Clara Swift and the kid; none of us could remember the boy’s name. But did any of us truly care if Paul Goode could or couldn’t keep his pecker in his pants? Was that what this was about, or was my mom imagining I might have a genetic pecker problem?

“Are you thinking I may have inherited Paul Goode’s unreadiness to be married?” I point-blank asked my mother.

Em’s pantomime was immediately clear; I didn’t need Nora to know what Em was saying. Em didn’t nod or shake her head; she just pointed to herself and shrugged. Her expression was inquiring but nonjudgmental. This is what I can’t help wondering, Em was saying. She wasn’t speaking for my mom, only for herself.

“Don’t go there, Kid,” the night groomer told me.

“I don’t think of infidelity as an inheritable characteristic, Adam—I’ve not heard of anyone who had a genetic predisposition to it,” the little English teacher said.

“I’ve told you, sweetie—I don’t think about Paul Goode at all. He was a nice boy when I knew him, but he was just some kid—he didn’t know what he was doing,” my mother said.

“That’s a good place to leave it, Ray—right there,” Molly told her.

Yet I couldn’t help wondering what Em had been wondering. Her pantomime wasn’t accusing me; Em was just thinking what I was thinking. I was my mother’s son, wasn’t I? Why wouldn’t I want a one and only? But if I was my father’s son, wouldn’t I have a pecker problem, too? Em was watching me; I knew she knew what I was thinking. I was watching Molly at the stove. Whatever the argument was between my mom and Molly, I was betting I would take the trail groomer’s side. Molly was as trustworthy as the snowshoer. There was a lot of lamb chili, more than enough for the five of us; maybe there really was a mystery guest coming to dinner. My mother liked drama, and she was good at it. What if Grace was coming to dinner? What if my meeting Grace, that old business, was all this was about?

“I’m just thinking about you, sweetie—I’m only thinking about your readiness, or unreadiness, to be married,” my mom said.

“He knows, Ray—he must be wondering where you’re hiding Grace,” Molly told her.

“You’re not ready to be married if you still think about that girl Zim found in Penn Station—you know, that Buddy, sweetie,” my mother went on.

“Not again, Ray—no more of this,” the night groomer tried to tell her.

“Or if you still think about that principled young woman, I think you called her—the one who wanted to read all of the dick novel, in order. You know, that Emmanuelle. You don’t still think about her—do you, sweetie?” my mom asked me.

Like many smart people, Grace was very observant. If Grace had been there, I’m sure she would have noticed that I didn’t or couldn’t look at Em, who not once—for the rest of the dinner party—looked at me. If Em and I had looked at each other, we both would have known I was still thinking about her. It was Em I was still thinking about—not that Buddy, or that Emmanuelle—but I would not meet Grace, not that night, not when Em was around. There was no mystery guest coming to dinner; Molly’s lamb chili was all for us. I took an enormous amount of leftovers back to the spec house. I would be eating lamb chili for days. Elliot and Em were leaving for New York the next morning, but we were up late in the spec house—telling Moby-Dick stories, and trying to translate Em’s pantomimes.

Em wasn’t the only serious fiction writer I knew who hadn’t read Moby-Dick, but she was the only one I knew who once imagined it was a pornographic novel—a dick novel, as my mom had just called it. Em blamed Nora for this misunderstanding, but we all remembered Nora’s hyphen theory fondly. Mr. Barlow and I had trouble understanding what Em was acting out for us—a certain moment Em was waiting for, when she intended to read Moby-Dick. It was necessary for Em to tip over the coffee table in order for us to understand she was waiting for an upheaval of some kind.

It was harder to get what Em was telling us about the unfolding Paul Goode scandal. Elliot and I got the part of the pantomime about Clara Swift—namely, how her longstanding decision not to give interviews served her well in this instance. The gossip columnists knew Clara Swift was off-limits. But the snowshoer and I didn’t get what Em was saying about Paul Goode himself; it wasn’t about his writing or his acting—that much we understood. Em seemed to be saying we might like him, if we knew him, but the little English teacher and I couldn’t get what we might like about my father, or exactly what we would like him for. Em just gave up and went to bed.

It was already late, but Elliot and I stayed up a little longer. When we couldn’t get what Em was pantomiming, we felt like we’d let her down. We were also exasperated with her; although it felt like we were betraying her, we wished Em would talk to us. Her terrible parents were dead. Hadn’t she stopped speaking because of them? When Em lost Nora, she lost more than a partner; she lost her only collaborator. The snowshoer and I felt guilty for thinking about Em this way, but we wished we knew what could make her speak.

In the predawn light, I could see Em better than I usually did when she made her nighttime bedroom visits. Em looked stressed out, but I knew she wouldn’t talk to me, and it was too early in the morning for an impromptu pantomime. She gave me a hug, but she didn’t go back to sleep; she moved on. I thought I heard her doing something in the kitchen; then I heard her come back upstairs. She was probably visiting the snowshoer. In the morning, I watched them drive away; seeing them leave, I imagined my bohemian life was leaving with them.

I would wonder, later, if I might have been happier living in Manchester Village or Manchester Center rather than on that uphill piece of land so far from town. I was brand new in town; I’d just moved into the spec house, but I already liked living in town. I could put on my hiking boots and walk everywhere; I loved putting on my backpack and walking to the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester Center. It’s a terrific bookstore—in the same league with Prairie Lights, in Iowa City. The first time I went to the Northshire, they treated me like a local author; the staff had read my novels. At first, I didn’t realize that my mother had prepared the Northshire booksellers for my moving to town. And before my mom knew I was moving to Manchester, she and Molly had been buying my novels at the Northshire. I suddenly saw Grace from a new perspective: my mother had been giving my novels to all her ski-school students. As one of the booksellers at the Northshire told me: “Your two moms have been giving your books to everyone who works at Bromley, for years.”

Not only at the Northshire, but at other places in Manchester, they knew who I was; they’d been expecting me to show up. I was happy that everyone already knew my two moms’ story. I should have known that Little Ray was a local celebrity, and that the night groomer was no one you could overlook. I saw Molly’s perspective on my underage dad in a new light; the story of the local author with two moms who worked at Bromley was a better story.

I would wonder, later, if it might have worked out if I’d stayed in town and bought the spec house. After all, it was for sale. As for the land off Dorset Hill Road in East Dorset, Molly said I could always sell it. I should have sold it. I should have bought the spec house with the excess furniture; I could have put books in the second hutch. But when something doesn’t work out, you don’t know what might have worked. I don’t believe that my staying in town would have helped.

The lies of omission were insurmountable. Once you start to acquiesce, there’s no stopping the acquiescence. Passive resistance didn’t work with Little Ray, and I wasn’t capable of winning a full-on fight with my mother. Of course I didn’t need a five-bedroom house with a view of the top of Bromley Mountain—nor did Grace. The three bedrooms in the spec house in Manchester would have sufficed for what went wrong.