Before she met Molly and Elliot, I’d not seen my mom flirt with anyone. After she married the snowshoer, and she was living with the snowcat operator, I never saw Little Ray flirt with anyone her own age or older. But my mother flirted with my wrestling teammates. She was very aware of her effect on boys and younger men. Don’t think I’m fantasizing—fantasizing about older women is what boys and younger men do.

Coach Dearborn invited my mom to wrestling practice. You’re always changing your level or your angle in wrestling. Coach Dearborn had seen my mom’s single-leg lunges; he wanted her to show my teammates how she did her squats and wall sits, too. That’s how the practice started—innocently enough, with my mother in sweatpants and a T-shirt, just demonstrating her ski exercises to the wrestlers. Explosiveness counts, in skiing and in wrestling, but before long my mom was rolling around with the other lightweights in the wrestling room—not just with the snowshoer. Little Ray took down Matthew Zimmermann with a picture-perfect double leg—what nowadays is called a freight-train double. She dropped her shoulder lower than Zim’s waist and drove through him—her hands holding both cheeks of Zimmer’s butt, her head tucked under his rib cage, as she stuck our starting 110-pounder on his back.

“I see someone’s been paying attention to her takedowns—that’s how to hit a double leg,” Coach Dearborn said.

“I told you,” the little English teacher said. “Ray would have been a heck of a one-ten-pounder.”

Zimmermann had the wind knocked out of him—he lay gasping on his back. My mom’s ministrations to him were a weird mix of more than motherly affection and training-room talk.

“Zim, listen to me,” she was saying as she bent over him with her hair falling in his face. “You got to breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth, or you’ll hyperventilate.”

The way she’d straddled Zimmer reminded me of the night she’d shown me the snowshoer kiss. I doubted this was the best way for Zim to regain normal breathing.

“No, no—purse your lips and blow out like this,” my mom was telling our gasping 110-pounder as she blew in his face. Was I the only one in the wrestling room who noticed Zimmer had a hard-on—not a known symptom of hyperventilation—or were his sweatpants just bunched up from the way Little Ray had driven him to the mat?

Before I knew what became of Matthew Zimmermann, I used to be afraid of what would become of him. What if Zimmer married an older woman, a dead ringer for Little Ray? I pictured poor Zim as attracted to older women who drilled him with freight-train doubles. Then they blew in his face and gave him hard-ons while he gasped for breath.