“Smarty-pants, Molly,” my mother said. Come late August 1995, she’d started talking to her potbelly. “I know I’m not still growing, but you are. Haven’t you figured out you belong to someone else?” my mom would say to her stomach. She was definitely thicker in the middle than Molly and I could remember.

“Is your mother putting on weight?” Grace asked me. We were making an effort to be civil to each other, for Matthew’s sake.

At the end of that summer, when Em and the snowshoer were visiting, Molly mentioned that my mom wasn’t hiking up Bromley Mountain the way she used to. “The snowshoer is still the first one to the top, but Ray used to get there ahead of me,” Molly said. “Something’s going on, Kid, but she won’t see a doctor—she just gives me the ‘no one’s messing around with my privates’ business,” the old patroller said.

By September, I’d moved my clothes to one of the guest bedrooms. Matthew accepted my move; he was used to my nomadic bedroom wandering. In our growing detachment from each other, Grace and I were better behaved—both around Matthew and with each other. A kind of coldness had replaced our lashing out. Grace’s instincts as an editor had taken over; if you can’t make something better, you should delete it, she said to her authors.

That September, my mother must have told me she was sorry a hundred times. If Molly was worried that something was going on with Little Ray, my mom’s apologies made me worry more. There was a finality to the way she blamed herself for my marrying Grace. My mother had observed how Grace managed to improve the people and things around her. “I don’t waste my time with people or things that aren’t essentially good to begin with,” Grace had told my mom. I knew this was Grace’s standard spiel about herself as an editor, but maybe it sounded original to my mother.

“I didn’t know she was one of those women who latch on to people they say they love, when they have every intention of trying to change them—I’m so sorry, sweetie,” my mom said.

“Nothing is your fault,” I told my mother. “It’ll work out—Grace and I want what’s best for Matthew.” I knew Grace was a perfectionist; she wouldn’t allow herself to make more of a mess of a bad situation. In our marriage, surely I’d behaved the worse, and I hadn’t paid for it. I didn’t know if I’d been lucky, or if there was another word for it.