“It should have been Helen, my first time,” Maud suddenly said. “I was thinking it should be her—I was wishing it was her—while I knew it was you, Adam,” Maud told me. I kept still.

“You should let Helen know how you feel, Maud,” Molly said softly.

“Is Helen still alive?” my mother asked. “She didn’t die?”

“That was the Helen in Jane Eyre, Ray—she’s the Helen who died,” Molly explained.

“Fucking books!” Little Ray exclaimed. “You should definitely let the Helen who’s alive know how you feel, Maud—maybe after you get your cast off.”

“I know,” Maud said, sounding subdued. “You’re my friend for life, if you want to be, Adam,” she told me. “There are worse ways to have sex the first time, you know.”

“He knows,” Molly told her.

“There are worse ways,” I agreed. “Friends for life, if you want to be,” I said to Maud. She wasn’t the right girlfriend for me, clearly, but the older you get, your friends for life mean more to you than the girlfriends or the boyfriends. In the passage of time, Maud and I would retain the awkwardness of the awkward age we were when we met, but we would stay friends. I would go on loving the tall runner with her arm in a cast, in an entirely Jane Eyre kind of way.

21. IN CONTROL

I developed a preternatural interest in what passed for physical affection or intimacy between my mother and the snowshoer. I was pulling for them, from the start. Whatever was between them, I wanted it to work—regardless of what was between my mom and Molly. I wasn’t privy to the conversations my mom and Elliot must have had. I didn’t know what choices were available to them in the area of Exeter faculty housing.

Mr. Barlow was obligated to do dorm duty. He’d been living in a bachelor faculty apartment in Bancroft Hall—or was it Webster? I can’t remember. The newlyweds and I would move into a two-bedroom faculty apartment on the second floor of Amen Hall. Amen was not a dorm devoted to prayer; it was named for Harlan Page Amen—for eighteen years, an actual and distinguished principal of Exeter. Unlike the diaper man, Principal Amen didn’t retire—in 1913, he died on the job. A far cry from the infant emeritus, electrocuted in a lightning storm while making music on a barbecue with croquet wickets—struck down while imagining his youngest daughter had married one of her illegitimate children.