“I saw some short stories, in magazines, but there wasn’t a collection—there was no book,” I told my mom and Molly. “I don’t think Sophie wrote a novel, not that I saw.”

“Not a surefire page-turner, sweetie—a novel about fibroids!” my mother exclaimed.

“Cut it out, Ray,” Molly told her.

“I’m pretty sure Grace doesn’t have fibroids, sweetie,” my mom reassured me. “Not that fibroids are the worst thing—except to the life of a washing machine, they’re not life-threatening or anything.”

“Just stop, Ray,” Molly said.

“I’m stopping, I’m stopping!” my mother promised.

Her memory was remarkable, I was thinking. She’d first and last seen Sophie twenty-five years before—another early morning in the ski season, when Molly was making pancakes.

The washing machine was in the kitchen of the Manchester house, and Sophie had been loading it with our bloody bedsheets. My mom and Molly were in their early forties; I was twenty-two. I’d met Sophie in a creative writing class in college, but Sophie was a little older—twenty-four or twenty-five. The uterine bleeding had caused her to miss two or three years of school.

“Fibroids are benign muscle-tissue tumors in the uterine wall,” Sophie was explaining to my mother and Molly. They hadn’t asked her about the bleeding; Sophie was always explaining it, unasked. “Fibroids generally don’t turn malignant or become dangerous, except for the sometimes severe bleeding they can cause—the bleeding can vary, from very little to hemorrhagic,” Sophie further explained.

I had my arms full of bloody pillowcases and towels; Sophie pointed to the washer, and I stuffed them in. I was wearing a T-shirt and boxers; Sophie pointed to my white T-shirt, which I took off and put in the washer. I liked having a writer girlfriend. We talked about writing, and our wanting to be writers, all the time, truly more than we talked about her constant bleeding—but we were always doing laundry. Sophie hated the sight of blood.

That early morning in the Manchester kitchen, Sophie started the load of laundry; she sipped her coffee without ever pausing in her lecture to Molly and Little Ray, who were speechless. Of course I’d heard Sophie’s fibroid prognostications before; I was always speechless. There’s nothing you can or should say when a woman is telling you about her nonstop uterine bleeding.