I would spend a lot of time answering Sophie’s question in the Q and A. I made an effort to put the endless mother questions to rest, knowing I never would. I talked about my repeated interest in a mother’s influence; I said the part of a mother that remains a mystery to her children is the part that interests me as a writer. I could tell I didn’t go far enough. The audience was polite about it, but they didn’t really buy it. Mary simply told me I could do better.

I was happy to see Sophie in the signing line. We gave each other a hug, but I could sense that neither of us wanted to be together. I was relieved about that. Yet even Sophie, who was completely pleasant, had something to say about my mom and the various mothers in my fiction. “I think you can say more about that, Adam—I’ve met your mom, you know,” was how Sophie said it, however pleasantly.

When I got back from Boston, I already knew I would call Wilson. The snowshoer and I were still sharing the little Barlows’ pied-à-terre. It was too small for us, especially when the little Barlows visited—if they were in town, I stayed with Nora and Em. And now that I’d written my first bestseller, Nora and Em were wondering why I didn’t get my own apartment in New York. Of course my mother kept telling me what was for sale in Manchester, Vermont. “You should live here, sweetie,” my mom had said.

But there was no one place I wanted to live, and I would always be undecided about living in New York. At the time, Elliot Barlow and I liked living together—“again,” as we would say. I still imagined I could keep the little English teacher safe.

“There are writers who are regionalists, and then there are the homeless ones,” I’d heard the snowshoer say. The pretty Mr. Barlow had pegged me as a homeless type, but Em and I had written each other about Elliot’s two categories of writers. Em and I thought we were in a third category—the undecided ones.

Naturally, when I got back from Boston, a letter from Em was waiting for me, telling me what a bad idea Wilson was. I knew Em understood why I thought about being with another fiction writer; Em thought about it, too. Yet Wilson was all wrong for me, Em wrote. Em knew I hadn’t read Wilson’s writing, but Em had read a couple of things. “Wilson could be depressed all the time because she knows she can’t write,” Em wrote me.