Exeter being Exeter, the snowshoer not only knew I was “the Brewster boy”; he knew my first name, too—he’d called me “Adam.” I was about to ask him his name, but he was rummaging through the Beetle’s glove compartment, where he found and handed to me a tattered-looking paperback of Great Expectations.

“Forgive the underlinings, all the marked passages—it’s my teacher’s copy,” the snowshoer said.

“All the better, I’m sure,” I told him. It struck me as an unlikely coincidence: the very novel he thought I should read just happened to be waiting for me in the glove compartment of his car. Then the snowshoer explained how he never drove anywhere in the Beetle without what he called “an emergency novel.”

“If I drive off the road and am lying upside down in a ditch, unable to move my legs or get out of the car, I want to have something good to read—an emergency novel,” Exeter’s smallest English teacher explained.

I thanked him, and got out of the car. I hope I was sufficiently sensitive to the little snowshoer’s fear of backing up; I made a point of not watching him back out of the driveway. Besides, I couldn’t wait to start reading Charles Dickens. At thirteen, I lacked the experience or the suffering to regret anything I’d done. No one close to me had died—not yet. No encounters or interactions with ghosts—not yet. As for Great Expectations, I couldn’t imagine how a story that begins in a graveyard—about a lonely boy who is accosted by an escaped convict “among the graves”—would become my emergency novel.

12. INTENDED FOR LITTLE RAY AND ME

In July 1956, only seventeen months after I had met the little snowshoer, my mother married him. His name was Elliot Barlow. He was seven years younger than my mom, who was thirty-four on her wedding day. This prompted Aunt Abigail, who was categorically denigrating to older brides, to say: “That makes you the oldest bride in the family, Rachel.”

“Just wait and see how old I am,” Nora said. At twenty-one, Nora had likened marriage to a terminal disease. She was not known to have had a boyfriend.

“I suppose Nora’s waiting for the right fella,” was all Aunt Abigail would say in her daughter’s defense.

“You can’t be fussy about the right fella, Nora,” Aunt Martha had chimed in. “You just have to try one.”

“I’m waiting for one who’ll let me cut his dick off,” Nora told them. “I’ll try that one.”