“Remember one thing, boys, about the much-maligned semicolon,” my youthful grandfather was saying to us. “The clause following a semicolon should ideally be a complete sentence; the part about a complete sentence is what distinguishes the semicolon from the dash,” the youthful Mr. Brewster further explained to us. “What follows a dash can but needn’t be a complete sentence—just an aside, perhaps a random interjection. Do you see, my dear boys?” Granddaddy’s ghost asked. When I nodded, I could tell that the trail groomer had gone to sleep—with one heavy leg thrown over me. The young English teacher went on and on, until I fell asleep, too. It was “I Forgot to Remember to Forget” that the zither man was playing when Molly and I woke up hugging each other.

“Is the damn ghost gone?” the night groomer asked me. He was. The punctuation lecture was over. When I tried to tell Molly what the ghost had taught me, all she said was: “I’m still not going to Aspen—not even if the conversation is about punctuation. Besides, we’ve got more important things to talk about, Kid.”

She sang the beginning of the Elvis song to me again—just a few lines from “I Forgot to Remember to Forget.”

I just started talking—I told Molly everything. How my mom had shown me the way she’d kissed the snowshoer—how I’d shown Em, who showed Nora, what kind of kiss it was. I even told the night groomer what I’d seen reflected in the skylight above my bed, and how little I understood what I saw. Molly kept holding me, but she just listened. By the time I finished everything I had to say, the zither-meister had stopped playing. Molly and I saw a predawn glow in the skylight. I’d told the trail groomer my most troubling thoughts—all the stuff about who was whose beard, and my mother’s apparent fondness for small, good-looking men and big, beautiful women. I mean truly everything.