I’m making a very small point. In other respects, I wouldn’t quarrel with a word Em wrote in that letter. She’s a real writer. “Nothing has changed because you know who your father is, except you know where your writer gene comes from,” Em wrote; she also echoed what Molly had told me privately.

“We should keep this business about who your father is to ourselves, Kid,” was the way Molly put it.

To my knowledge, only Nora had looked into the legal side of it. Was it, or is it, a crime in Colorado for an eighteen-year-old woman to have sex with a fourteen-year-old boy? What mattered, Molly told me, was my mother’s job. Little Ray taught beginners how to ski; most of them were children. “Fourteen and younger, Kid,” was the way Molly put it. It was hard to miss her point. “I’m not saying what you writers do is immoral—stealing stuff that real people say, or do, seems fair to me,” the trail groomer told me. “But there’s people who would say what your mom did is definitely immoral—to have you in such a way that you would be all hers. If you see what I mean, Kid,” Molly said. “Legal or illegal, fourteen is underage.”

On the evidence of Paul Goode in The Kindergarten Man, I was not “all hers.” Was it a lie of omission—to keep what Molly called “this business” to ourselves? It was what Nora always said: everything was about sex and secrets. Everyone who knew Paul Goode was my father loved my mother; we were committed to protecting her.

The snowshoer, even as a woman, was too much of a gentleman of the old school to brag about my mom’s escapade to the little Barlows, who were congratulating themselves for being the first to recognize the noir genius of Paul Goode. Goode was forty-seven when The Kindergarten Man made him a movie star and a Hollywood celebrity—a little long in the tooth to be discovered. At my mom’s wedding, it had been Susan Barlow who said, “I know we’re going to be seeing more of him.”

But Elliot Barlow, as a man and as a woman, knew how to be discreet. Little Ray was very much more and somewhat less than a wife to the snowshoer, who would never tell tales out of school about her.