Nora had called me Longhand Man, but Em wrote in longhand, too. I watched Em leaf through the pages of her writing on the worktable. I was wrong about the meaning of the X sign Em gave me; I’d wrongly assumed her writing in progress was strictly fiction. When Em came back to the bedroom that would be all hers, the pages she gave me were from a long letter she had begun writing me before the shooting. Em had been giving me the X sign for my mom’s matchmaking activities in Vermont; Em was crossing her fingers to the Grace idea, and where it came from.

“Grace looks like a young Clara Swift, and I know how Clara Swift affects you—she gets to me that way, too, you know,” Em wrote me. By a young Clara Swift, Em meant that Grace was now in her early thirties—about the same age Clara Swift was in ’77, when she gave birth to Paul Goode’s child. (That kid was almost a teenager now, and Clara Swift was in her forties—if not the hottie Em and I once imagined she was, still very much a hottie.) Em was hell-bent on making more comparisons between Grace and a young Clara Swift, some of which were (I thought) more literary than actual. I could imagine that I might be smitten with Grace because I was already smitten with a movie star, and Grace looked like her. But it struck me as far-fetched that women in their thirties—especially, women who marry much older men—want to get pregnant and have a baby almost immediately. Clara Swift was thirty-one when she had Paul Goode’s baby; Paul Goode would be in his sixties when that kid was a teenager. If I met and married Grace, and we had a baby, bang-bang, I would be a virtual geezer (in my sixties) when our kid was a teenager. “You know your mom has an agenda. Trust me, at her age, Grace will have her own agenda,” Em wrote me. This much of her long letter to me was all about the arranged marriage and subsequent fatherhood I would be facing, upon my moving to Vermont. Em had further decided that she wanted the snowshoer to read this much of her letter.

The rest of her letter, Em made clear, was for my eyes only. All I said to Em, loudly enough for Elliot to hear, was: “You also wrote me that my mom must have looked like Clara Swift.”