Nor is it surprising that the snowshoer thought I was contemplating two titles. I don’t know why, but I’d written down the two things my mom said as if they were titles:

“Almost Perfect”

“No Strings Attached”

“I see you’re having a title dilemma,” the little English teacher told me, when I came back to the kitchen table. I saw what he was looking at. I’d not told him these stories. “I’m aware I don’t know the context—I have no idea what you’re thinking,” Elliot said. “Both phrases are trite, but ‘No Strings Attached’ is more clichéd than ‘Almost Perfect’—I think it’s a worse cliché,” the snowshoer said.

“I wasn’t really thinking of them as titles—they’re just a couple of things my mom said,” I told him.

“Oh, of course, they sound just like your mom—they work fine as dialogue,” the little English teacher assured me.

24. MELANCHOLIC ENOUGH

That boy, the one who wasn’t shaving, the boy who couldn’t take his eyes off Little Ray—my mother told Molly he looked thirteen or fourteen. “The kid told Ray he was almost fifteen,” Molly told me. Beginning with his age, Molly and I sensed there were likely some strings attached.

“He was no big deal!” my mom had insisted to Molly, but—whoever the kid was—he was a big deal to me.

Molly and I knew boys who couldn’t keep their eyes off my mother—my wrestling teammates, Matthew Zimmermann among them. How my mom had described the kid in Aspen to Molly was consistent with what she’d said about him to me. “He was small,” my mother had emphasized. “He would have been a pretty girl,” she’d told Molly and me.

“She never told you about this kid before?” I asked Molly.

“Ray said she gave some of her clothes to a boy who was a little smaller than she was—she didn’t say she slept with him,” Molly told me. “Not at first.”

“What clothes did she give him?” I asked the snowcat operator.

“Ray gave the kid a ski sweater—it was too small for her, but it was a little big on him,” Molly said. “There was a ski hat, too—Ray said she never liked it, but she liked it on him.”

“A ski hat with a pom-pom?” I asked Molly.

“Ray didn’t say there was a pom-pom,” Molly said.

“I’m not sure about it,” I told her, truthfully.

“There are always strings attached, Kid,” Molly said.

Had I seen my father as a ghost? Was he the short boy with the tall snow shovel? Had he been wearing my mom’s ski sweater? Was that her hat, with the girlish pom-pom? And why did I think this ghost looked like it was still alive?