“If not her neck, maybe her spine,” the night groomer said, after the replays. They’d made Molly a full-time ski patroller at Bromley—at first, in addition to putting her in charge of the trail grooming. Later, when they made her the director of the ski patrol, she was given a backup role in the snowcat operations. When she was over fifty, Molly was only occasionally a snowcat operator on the mountain. “I’m a night groomer when I want to be, Kid,” was how she explained it to me, “or when one of the regular fellas is sick or needs a break.”

Molly was not a neurosurgeon, but the trail-groomer-turned-ski-patroller was pretty much right in her analysis of Monika Behr’s crash at Cortina—it was a spinal injury, resulting in paralysis of both lower limbs. In her early twenties, Monika Behr became a paraplegic—a big woman, bordering on homely, in a wheelchair.

“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.