“Oh, my God, that poor girl—she’s not even pretty!” my mother lamented. Yes, I know—I’m leaving too much out. Writing screenplays will do that to you. And this was the leap I should have seen coming, but I didn’t.

Molly did. “Don’t, Ray,” the ski patroller started to say.

“Poor Monika Behr—she’ll become like one of your unfortunate girlfriends, Adam!” my mom declared. “Too big, always fighting her weight, and never was or will be good-looking—I’m talking about the younger ones, sweetie, the ones even close to your own age,” my mother said. “The kind of women you look at, but then, more quickly, you look away from—those poor women you know you’ll never stay with, not for long. Poor Monika Behr will become your type, sweetie!”

“Stop it, Ray,” Molly told her.

“I’m not even talking about your older girlfriends, Adam. I know you’re not inclined to introduce Molly and me to the older ones, but I can manage to get a few details out of Elliot—that oh-so-discreet man!—and your grandmother occasionally slips up. Dottie isn’t exactly discreet, you know. Poor Jasmine,” my mom said, after a pause.

“Sorry, Kid,” the trail groomer told me.

There was something disingenuous about how softly my mother said the Poor Jasmine part, her hushed voice sounding somewhat falsely sympathetic to Jasmine. I was thirty when I went out with Jasmine, who was fifty. Tellingly, Jasmine was a year older than my mom—closer to Molly’s age. Jasmine was one of the divorcées I dated. She liked to call her ex-husbands or former boyfriends just to give them a piece of her mind. She liked unloading her grievances on anyone who answered the phone—a new wife or girlfriend, or even a child.

Jasmine would end up being my second-most unmarriageable girlfriend. When I was ready to break up with her, I took her to the Front Street house, where my grandmother (who was eighty-nine) tried to warn me that Jasmine might be “especially susceptible” to seeing ghosts.

“It’s not just that Jasmine is as old as your mother, dear,” Nana began.

“Jasmine is older than Ray, ya know, Adam,” Dottie said.

“I know,” I told her. I’m not sure how old Dottie was—I never really knew. If Nana was eighty-nine, I’m guessing Dottie was in her seventies.

“Furthermore—Adam, dear—I don’t believe Jasmine knows you think she’s unmarriageable,” my grandmother pointed out. “Jasmine still thinks of herself as marriageable.”

“Jasmine just keeps marryin’ and marryin’, don’t she?” Dottie asked me.

“I know,” I said. The three of us were in the kitchen of the Front Street house, where we were washing the supper dishes. Dottie had already pointed out that Jasmine was the first of my unmarriageable girlfriends to have cleaned her plate of one of Nana’s gloppy casseroles. We could hear Jasmine talking on the phone, all the way from the living room. She was unloading her bitter feelings on a former boyfriend, or one of her ex-husbands—not the ex-husband who had died, I hoped. Jasmine hadn’t told me that she’d seen her ex-husband who’d died, but Jasmine had confided this to Dottie and my grandmother.