“We should keep this business about who your father is to ourselves, Kid,” Molly more succinctly put it. We didn’t want my mother to go to jail—or lose her job, teaching underage kids to ski.

Em echoed what Molly told me. “Nothing has changed because you know who your father is, except you know where your writer gene comes from,” Em wrote me. Although I missed her when I moved to Vermont, I never wanted to see Em pantomime where my writer gene came from. Yet the past is everlasting. I imagined I would always hear Em’s orgasm, from a distance.

“You were the wrong age to hear Em’s orgasms,” my mom had recently reminded me, “but you should try to stop thinking about it—it’s just not realistic for you to think about Em in that way, sweetie.” I should have listened to my mother, but not on the subject of Em’s orgasm. What was not realistic, for a fiction writer, was for me to imagine I could ever stop thinking about Em in that way. And to think I used to wonder what it would be like to hear Em’s orgasm firsthand. It might make you deaf, or otherwise cause permanent damage.

I do not believe I should have listened to my mom about everything, although I take to heart her “every creature wants to have a normal life—even an octopus!” In the context of how I’d hurt the feelings of people I loved, my mother was right to criticize me.

Yet what I really should have listened to my mother about were the lies of omission. So what if she was a hypocrite? As Nora knew, my mom was an authority on the subject of lies of omission; on that subject, like skiing, my mother knew what she was talking about. “You can’t hide things or keep secrets from Grace—you have to tell her everything,” my mom had told me.

“We didn’t tell Adam we were more than friends, did we?” Molly had asked her. “We didn’t tell him everything, Ray.”

“We were going to tell you, sweetie,” my mom had responded. There was no lasting acrimony, but what was lost in our conversation was my mother’s advice. And then there was the underage business; to protect my mom, Molly and I (not to mention Little Ray herself) were disinclined to tell Grace everything. We were all okay about keeping my family history a secret from Grace.