My devious-cruising aunts—I mean devious in the bad way—had done their treacherous best to undermine Nana’s efforts to make me love and trust her Rescue Ship Rachel.

“Little Ray,” Principal Brewster had named my mother. The nickname the principal emeritus had given her was not as astonishing to me as the evidence that the former headmaster had ever spoken.

“But of course he used to talk, dear,” Nana told me. “How could a head of school not speak? And Principal Brewster was a teacher before he became—in his own way—a headmaster. Oh, dear—you can’t imagine how that man could talk!”

“But what happened to him, Nana?” I asked her. “What made him stop talking?” I must have wrung my hands.

“When you’re old enough, Adam,” my grandmother began; then she stopped. “Someone will tell you when you’re old enough,” she said. “Please don’t hurt your hands—they’re so small.”

“Aunt Abigail or Aunt Martha, maybe,” I ventured to guess.

“Someone else, I hope,” my grandmother said. “Little Ray herself, maybe,” she added softly, without conviction.

“Little Ray is a one-event girl—I already told you,” Aunt Martha reminded me, when I asked her to fill in a few missing details. Yes, but Martha’s earlier reference to my mom as a one-event girl had to do with her being strictly a slalom skier; it was connected to her being small. Now Martha was implying that all three Brewster girls were inclined to one event—in the specific sense that they all wanted one, and only one, child. This was sheer manipulation on Aunt Martha’s part. I was used to it, and used to worse from Aunt Abigail—the firstborn Brewster, and proud of it, the cow.

“Little Ray was an accident—an unplanned child. She wasn’t meant to be born,” Aunt Abigail told me, when I pressed her to tell me what she knew.

“A latecomer,” Aunt Martha chimed in. “It’s annoying, Adam—how you wring your hands.”

You can imagine how confusing this was to me. My mother was named for the Rachel in Moby-Dick—a rescue-ship girl—and she’d named me after the Garden of Eden guy. According to my grandmother, my mom was a one-event girl—but not in either of the two ways Aunt Martha meant it.

Nana meant my mother wanted nothing more to do with men. Was my grandmother actually telling me that my mom was that kind of one-event girl—namely, had Rescue Ship Rachel chosen the one and only time she would ever sleep with a man, strictly for the purpose of giving birth to me?