My mother met my future wife before I did. My mom gave her ski lessons. Little Ray and the snowcat operator decided that this young woman might be the one for me. My mom and Molly would hold on to each other—no falling off the cliff for them.

“Now that you’ve met the right woman, don’t ever lie to her, Adam,” my mom would say. “Lies of omission count as lies, sweetie—they can be the worst ones.” This really rubbed me the wrong way.

What a hypocrite my mother was. Imagine her telling me that lies of omission counted as lies. Hadn’t she demonstrated that lies of omission could be the worst ones? She’d not told me about her and Molly! She’d let me discover them as a couple—in their unforgettable, upside-down embrace. “Molly and I were thinking of the best time to tell you, sweetie—we thought after the wedding would have been best,” was how my mom put it.

“That was an apology, kiddo—just get over it,” Nora would tell me, but not even Em would nod her head to that. Em and I were on the same page when it came to a lie of omission of that magnitude. My mother should have told me about her and Molly. This was why I didn’t heed her advice about lies of omission. Nora had tried to set me straight: “No one knows more than Ray about lies of omission. You should listen to her on the subject, kiddo.”

The past is everlasting. In my new life, with my new wife, I got off to a bad start. I should have forsworn the lies of omission, including how I put off telling her about the ghosts. In my defense, I was remembering my experiences with some previous girlfriends—the ones I told about the ghosts. With a few of my most unmarriageable girlfriends, telling them about the ghosts was a good way to initiate the process of breaking up with them. Usually, they thought I was kidding. If I insisted that I was one of those people who saw ghosts, they thought I was crazy and broke up with me.

There were the disbelieving girlfriends who asked me to prove it. When my grandmother was still alive, I took the disbelievers to the Front Street house. When the semicolon emeritus appeared, there were mixed reactions to him. Like Molly, there were women who didn’t believe in ghosts, or they simply didn’t see them; in their eyes, I was a nutcase. This is a relatively painless way to break up with someone. Yet when the disbelievers saw Granddaddy’s ghost, of course I would be blamed for their paranormal experience—as if the supernatural manifestations were all my fault.