“When Ray was younger—yes, she did,” the snowshoer said. How many women can look like Clara Swift? I was wondering. Not my mother, not at any age, I was thinking. “Ray is your mom, Adam—you’re not supposed to see her as an attractive woman, in the way other men do,” the little English teacher told me, with Em nodding her head off. Elliot Barlow had always been able to read my mind, I was thinking, when the snowshoer suddenly sighed. Mr. Barlow had finished reading as much of Em’s letter to me as Em had wanted Elliot to read. Poor Elliot—she knew all about my mother’s penchant for agendas. Little Ray had married the snowshoer, thereby giving me a stepfather who would get me through Exeter, and through much more. Hadn’t that arranged marriage also worked for the snowshoer—not to mention for my mom and Molly? “Ray is a good mother—she’s just doing what she believes would be best for Adam,” the snowshoer discreetly said, handing the selected pages of Em’s letter back to Em.

The way Em began to dance with me brought me back to the first time I had danced with her, at my mom’s wedding—when Em tried to make me look at her eyes, not at her breasts. The way Em tilted my head, so that I was staring at her breasts, and then she lifted my face to her eyes, made her pantomime of our wedding dance completely clear. “I remember the dancing,” I told Em, but she kept making her point: I’d been too young to know better; I was only fourteen. I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to stare at a girl’s boobs when you were dancing with her. The snowshoer and I understood Em’s pantomime; it was unnecessary for Em to count out fourteen on her fingers, but she did. We thought we saw where Em was going with her pantomime—namely, it was okay for a mother to be proactive in arranging her kid’s future when the kid is only fourteen. But I was going to be forty-eight in a little more than a week. My mom shouldn’t be arranging my marriage, or my procreative future—not now. That’s where Elliot and I believed Em’s pantomime was headed.