I didn’t want to imagine Emmanuelle taking a shit on the putting green; I really must have known I shouldn’t be imagining Emmanuelle at all. My mother was pointing out how the River Bend residents wobbled; they even wobbled when they walked—not that all of them could walk, my mom told us. “Imagine the River Benders squatting—they’d fall over!” Little Ray was saying. I didn’t want to imagine the River Benders I’d met squatting, my grandmother included.

“I don’t think dumping is all that athletic a thing, Ray,” Molly told my mom, but I was trying to tune them out. Should I make contact with Emmanuelle, her athleticism notwithstanding? Could I spend the rest of my life not knowing where the voyage of the Pequod ended for my grandmother? Did I believe her reading Moby-Dick to me had made me a writer? My childhood attachment to Exeter had ended; not even my uncles were around to remind me of it.

Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan were both in their seventies when their voyage on the Pequod ended. Nora said they were living like boys again. They’d moved up north, to be near the skiing; they’d traded their cars for a truck, like a couple of Carroll County old-timers. They’d bought a house near North Conway, and Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan went everywhere and did everything together. “With one truck,” as Nora put it, “they had to.” My uncles never got tired of each other’s company; they just loved fooling around together. Everywhere they drove, they would sing along with the song on the radio.

I last saw Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan when they came to New York to see Nora and Em onstage at the Gallows. It was the first and only time my uncles saw Two Dykes, One Who Talks; it was understood (but unspoken) that they wouldn’t have enjoyed themselves as much if my aunts had been alive and with them. My uncles had laughed and laughed; they’d loved the show. They’d loved seeing the snowshoer, too; Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan kept telling the snowshoer how pretty she was as a woman.

My uncles also loved Damaged Don, who’d written and was singing a new song. That night at the Gallows, we were told it was the premiere of “No Lucky Star,” but, predictably, it was the same old song, and Damaged Don sang it in the same, near-death drone.