My mom and Molly and I watched Franz Klammer’s gold-medal downhill run at Innsbruck—the 1976 Winter Olympics. Klammer looked to me like he was on one ski, and about to crash, the whole way. He came close to hitting the hay bales at the edge of the piste. On one of their trips to Austria, only a year or two before Klammer’s run, the snowshoer had taken my mother to Innsbruck—she wanted to see the Patscherkofel course. Molly and my mom and I watched Klammer’s win-or-crash run on TV in Manchester, Vermont. Little Ray was screaming for Franz Klammer, all the way. “That’s how your mom likes to ski, Kid,” the trail groomer told me. “Not the way she teaches the beginners.” It was the first I’d heard, from anyone, about how my mother liked to ski, but the way Little Ray behaved at wrestling matches had tipped me off. Yet hadn’t she hidden her anger and her daredevil recklessness from me? Weren’t these aspects of her nature also in the category of lies of omission?

“There’s no end to her secrets,” I remember saying to Nora. (This was right after the 1976 Winter Olympics.)

Nora gave me her tell-me-something-I-don’t-know shrug. “There’s a title in what you say—No End to Her Secrets. Maybe you can use it, kiddo,” was all Nora said. It was a better title than Substitute Fathers, I knew. I didn’t have to look at Em to know she was nodding.

I was in my thirties when Franz Klammer’s gold-medal run made my mother exclaim, “If I’d been your size, Molly, I would have been a downhill racer—slalom is baloney!” My mom and Molly were in their fifties. It was the first time I’d heard Little Ray disparage her own smallness. I’d adjusted to my mother’s falling in love with a woman as big as the night groomer, but I’d not heard her say she wished she’d been bigger herself—not even as a skier.

The next winter, in December—on the same TV in Manchester, Vermont—my mom and Molly and I were watching a women’s downhill race at Cortina. Franz Klammer, who was only twenty-three, would win the men’s downhill at Kitzbühel a month later. Another Austrian, Annemarie Moser-Pröll, won the downhill at Cortina. Molly had picked Moser-Pröll to win, but my mom was cheering for Monika Behr—Moser-Pröll’s hotshot teammate. As you may remember, if you saw her fall, that would be Monika Behr’s last time on skis.