It was Molly who found a way to ask Catherine, Grace’s mother, about the Catholicism. According to Catherine, those Barretts from England had let their Catholicism lapse a long time ago. The English Barretts were Anglicans. Catherine’s maiden name was Barnard; her family came from England, too. “Both the Barretts and the Barnards were Church of England people, same as Episcopalians here,” Catherine told the trail groomer.

It had been Nora’s opinion that lapsed Catholics were the best ones. My mother assured Nora that Grace had grown up going to the Episcopal church in Manchester. Grace and her parents had always skipped going to church on Sundays in the winter; they’d gone skiing instead. By the time Grace was in high school, the whole family had stopped going to church at all. “If you ask me, sweetie, Grace is a lapsed Episcopalian,” my mom told me.

“There is no such thing as a lapsed Episcopalian, Ray—Episcopalians are lapsed to begin with,” the little English teacher said.

“I just didn’t want you to go down the nonstop-procreation road, kiddo,” Nora told me. That bullet dodged, there was nothing holding me back from meeting Grace. Even Jasmine had stopped calling.

“Jasmine is old enough to have died, sweetie,” my mother reminded me.

I would wonder, later, why the difference in our ages had not held Grace back from meeting me. She was nearly fifteen years younger than I was; she was born the year my mom married Mr. Barlow, the year I started at Exeter. Grace was seventeen, in high school, when she began reading my novels—when I was already thirty-one. As the little English teacher would tell me, I was forgetting how the novels I’d read at Exeter had affected me; those nineteenth-century novels had made me want to be a writer. What if there’d been a contemporary novelist who affected me that way? There wasn’t, but I was overlooking how my novels led to Grace’s passion for reading other novels; Grace would tell me her interest in publishing began with her reading my novels.

We were married on June 9, 1990, a Saturday—scarcely six months after we met. Grace said she knew I knocked her up on the Wednesday before our wedding night—June 6, D-Day. About a month before we were married, the contractor had broken ground for the house we were building on that uphill piece of land in East Dorset; Grace and I already called it “our house,” long before the ground had thawed and they were able to start digging. We knew we would still be living in the spec house when our baby was born; our new house wouldn’t be ready to move into until June 1991.