“This is an eccentric grocery list,” Grace said. Uh-oh, I was thinking—my mom’s sweep of the upstairs had not found every trace of Em. Only Em would write a grocery list as long as the one Grace began reading to us, just as Molly came back in the kitchen. Given Grace’s familiarity with Emily MacPherson’s writing, Grace knew who’d made such an unusual contribution to my grocery list—and Em wasn’t writing to me in the third person. Of course I remembered the recent context of what Em was now saying on a shopping list; Grace read aloud Em’s pantomime, the one Mr. Barlow and I had struggled to understand. Poor Em had given up and gone to bed. Maybe mime wasn’t the best theatrical technique for conveying an interior monologue. What Em meant was perfectly clear on the grocery list, and Grace Barrett was a good reader; Grace was easy to understand.

“In his interviews, even now, Paul Goode comes across as more believable and sympathetic than he ever does in his writing or his acting,” Em had written. “I wonder if you might like him, if you met him; I wonder if you might think he was a good guy in real life. Maybe, if you met him, he wouldn’t be the disappointment he is to you—as a writer. Perhaps, if you knew him, he would come off better than the one-note sarcastic little shit you think he is—as an actor,” Em wrote.

“I’ve never seen a grocery list with a semicolon,” Grace said, “and her handwriting is almost too precise to be handwritten. Does Emily MacPherson write in longhand?” Grace asked me.

“Em writes in longhand,” I told her.

“You write in longhand, too, sweetie,” my mom said; she was trying to change the subject. But Grace Barrett was an editor; she knew the subject on the grocery list was Paul Goode, not writing in longhand.

“Your mother told me you write in longhand, but I never knew you didn’t like Paul Goode!” Grace exclaimed, taking a beer from the fridge.

“I’m not crazy about his writing or his acting,” I said, trying to keep it simple.

“The heck with his writing or his acting—Paul Goode was the first man I imagined losing my virginity to,” Grace told us. She’d been sixteen when she saw The Wrong Car for the first time. Her driver’s license was brand new when she drove to Bennington to see the movie; maybe there was a noir film festival at the college. Grace thought it was a funny story; she seemed disconcerted that we weren’t laughing. I’d seen The Wrong Car in 1960—when Grace was a four-year-old. She’d still been in high school when she saw The Kindergarten Man, she told us—“when Paul Goode was a little younger than you are now,” Grace said to me. Our silence made her tentative.