My mom had made up for any lack of physical contact Elliot may have been missing. Whenever those familiar-looking faculty wives were approaching us, my mother was all over Elliot; my mom rode piggyback on Elliot, her arms around Elliot’s chest, her legs locked at Elliot’s waist. It was not lost on Molly that the rehearsal dinner for my mom’s wedding had been at this same Exeter Inn, where an emotionally shattered waitress was brought to her knees by the aria of Em’s orgasm ecstasies—and was later struck in her lower abdomen by a chocolate cupcake with cranberry frosting, a sidearm shot from Henrik’s lacrosse stick. It seemed suitable to Molly that my mom would mount the snowshoer in public at the Exeter Inn, of all places. “Ray wants everyone to know they’re still married,” Molly told me.

“If my mom starts humping the snowshoer, maybe we should jump in and break it up,” I said to the ski patroller.

“You’re the wrestler, Kid—I’ll let you jump in and break it up,” the trail groomer said.

The faculty wives who approached us were warm to Elliot as a woman, but some of those ladies were less warm to Little Ray. A few of the faculty wives had read my novels, or at least one of my novels; there was only one wife who told me she was disappointed that I hadn’t written more about “Exeter people.” As for the younger Exeter people, there were some current students who spoke to me about my writing, but the ones who’d actually read my novels were relatively new girls at the school. If there were fiction readers among my former wrestling teammates—all of us were in our thirties—not one of them told me that he’d read my novels. Three or four of the guys mentioned that their mothers or their wives had read something I’d written.

Business as usual, I thought, when I noticed a long-armed guy who’d been keeping his distance. You know how it is when you know you know someone, but you don’t remember who he is. With wrestlers, you remember the guys around your own weight class. The snowshoer didn’t remember the sullen fellow’s name, but she knew more than I did.