Apparently, Dave’s parents didn’t want to meet anyone who might have given their son AIDS in the first place. As the little English teacher put it, Dave’s parents thought of us as “among the perpetrators.” We never saw them, but we’d seen their woman driver—she looked more like a Russian shot-putter than a chauffeur. Sometimes, while she was waiting, she got out of the limo to stretch; the Russian driver did her stretching on the hood of the car, which looked cleaner than anything in that area of Seventh Avenue.

Dave died at St. Vincent’s. He’d told the snowshoer that his parents had wanted him to die at home, in their apartment—not at St. Vincent’s, where so many people were dying of AIDS. But Dr. Dave wanted to die where other AIDS patients were dying, including some of his endocrinology patients.

I thought Dave’s parents were crazy. “No, they’re not crazy—they’re just parents,” Mr. Barlow had said.

When you write fiction from so-called real life, there are those details you feel free to change, because you know you can make them better—or worse, if making things worse is your thing. “As a writer, Adam, making things as bad as they can be is your predilection,” the little English teacher told me.

“You’re a worst-case-scenario guy, as a writer,” Em wrote me.

“It takes one to know one,” I wrote her back. As a writer, Em had moved on from The Coming Out Stories. Her mom and dad were still writing to her, and Em’s father kept writing to Cardinal John Joseph O’Connor. Her dad had continued to copy Em on his letters to the cardinal, but Em didn’t write back to her parents, and she had stopped writing fiction about them.

When you write fiction from so-called real life, there are also those details you sense are unchangeable—because you know you can’t make them any better, or any worse, than they already are.

After Dr. Dave died, the snowshoer was visiting another friend who was dying at St. Vincent’s. The candid nurse we knew recognized the pretty Mr. Barlow. The nurse said the hospital’s security personnel had to be vigilant in their efforts not to admit Dave’s parents to St. Vincent’s. The snowshoer said it was understandable why St. Vincent’s had to keep Dave’s parents out of the hospital, after Dr. Dave died.