“Looks like your lady friend shoulda been wearin’ the diaper,” Dottie replied. (You have to admire the old-timers from Maine, the ones who take charge in a crisis.) “You should see yourself, Adam,” Dottie told me. “Go clean yourself up in your mom’s bathroom. I’ll clean up this mess and attend to the lady.”

As politely as possible, I tried to indicate to Dottie that she should take off her terrifying halo and do something about her moonstruck face cream. “Well, sure as shit, I intend to take this stuff off,” Dottie said, somewhat indignantly. “What with all the caterwaulin’, Adam, I didn’t think I should dillydally about gettin’ here.”

“Dottie will take care of you,” I said to Jasmine. I definitely sensed there would be no more constructive conversations between us. Given that shit of this magnitude had happened, I knew there would be only Jasmine’s incriminating phone calls.

23. “ALMOST PERFECT” OR “NO STRINGS ATTACHED”

I’ve not described in what way my mom became a wrestling fanatic. I know I haven’t given you a picture of how she behaved at wrestling matches. My teammates loved her and her behavior, but she embarrassed me. That several of my teammates were in love with my mother—not least, the smallest of them, our starting 110-pounder—further embarrassed me. I doubt that Coach Dearborn had a crush on my mom. The coach wasn’t flirting with her on the dance platform at the Front Street wedding—their single-leg lunges were just lunges to him.

Coach Dearborn never lost his temper—he would reprove us when we lost ours. “Getting angry is a distraction for wrestlers,” he told us. Yet he was as delighted as my teammates when Little Ray lost her temper at wrestling matches; she mostly vented her frustration at referees. Speaking diplomatically, as he was inclined to, Coach Dearborn said, “The quality of refereeing in New England is not what I was used to in the Big Ten.”

I once asked Molly if my mother had been cheated by a low score when she’d been a slalom skier, in competition. Or, in some other way, had Little Ray been unfairly judged by a racing official? “I didn’t know her when she was competing, Kid,” was all Molly said about it.