I knew, of course, she meant the house I would one day build on the uphill piece of land I’d just bought in East Dorset. It was uphill, all right. Molly and I had walked around up there, in the knee-deep snow. “The land is a deal, Kid—you can always resell it,” Molly said. I’d made an offer on the land, which had been instantly accepted. My mother had already been talking to a local contractor; I’d seen the drawings. I asked Molly why my mom believed I would one day need more than three bedrooms. “You should ask your mom yourself, Kid, but I can tell you how she does the math,” Molly said. “There’s the master bedroom, for you and Grace, and adjacent to it would be the baby’s room—for the baby you’re going to have as fast as humanly possible. But the baby’s room would become Grace’s dressing room as soon as the baby is old enough to have a room of its own, and that’ll leave you without a guest bedroom.”

“So I need four bedrooms, just to have one bedroom left over for guests?” I asked Molly.

“You’re opening a can of worms, Kid, but your mom thinks you need five bedrooms—she says your kind of extended family needs more than one guest bedroom,” the trail groomer told me.

“Extended to whom?” I asked.

“To be fair, Kid, your mom didn’t name names,” Molly said.

As it turned out, I could actually make use of the two guest bedrooms I had in the spec house—Em and the snowshoer came to stay with me for Christmas. Given Em’s proclivity for nighttime traveling to the accessible bedrooms, the surplus furniture presented a hazard. Even armed with a flashlight, Em stubbed her toe on a chair in the upstairs hall, she banged her knee on the giant hutch—a formidable obstacle in her guest bedroom—and she walked into a tall armoire in Elliot Barlow’s guest bedroom, scraping her shoulder.