“Don’t be a know-it-all, Molly,” my mom said. She had the highest expectations for my moving to Vermont, a little like her expectations for my meeting Grace.

“Ray, let Adam meet Grace—let them decide if they want to go out,” the trail groomer had told my mother, who was buying me ski clothes before it started to snow. “Your mom is not one to doubt herself, Kid,” Molly reminded me.

“It’s kind of bad timing, sweetie—that you’re leaving New York and moving here, when Grace lives in New York. If you know what I mean,” my mother said, which was simultaneously clear and mystifying. Given all the ballyhoo about Grace, I certainly remembered she worked in publishing; I knew she’d started as an editorial assistant, one of the few who’d been promoted and was actually working as an editor and a publisher. Of course I remembered that Grace had grown up in Manchester, and she’d learned to ski at Bromley. I knew her family lived in town; I’d been told she was good about coming home to see her parents. It was the bad timing part of my moving to Manchester that was mystifying to me. Molly had to explain my mom’s logic.

My mother had first imagined my meeting Grace when I lived in New York. Then I would have loved living in New York, with Grace, Molly explained. My mom had to rethink how the rest of my life (with Grace) would go, now that I’d moved to Manchester before I met Grace. I asked Molly if my mother had imagined where our children would go to school—that is, if I was a writer in Vermont and Grace kept her publishing job in New York. The trail groomer laughed. “Your mom hasn’t imagined herself as a grandmother, Kid—she’s got all she can handle, managing your life and mine,” Molly said. The ski patroller and I knew how managerial my mother could be.

In 1989, my mom was sixty-seven; Molly, who would only say she was “a year or two older,” was almost seventy. The night groomer said her birthday was “nobody’s business”—she refused to celebrate it. But my mother knew exactly how old Molly was. Little Ray also knew the ski business.