“It’s a good thing you two moved to Canada, so you can get away from shit like this,” Matthew said, giving Em a hug.

“We can’t get away from shit like this, Matthew—there’s no getting away from this shit,” she said, not letting him go.

“I know,” he told her.

“Pussy-grabbers!” Carol was calling the yahoos in baseball caps on TV, where the chanting to lock up Hillary just went on.

I remembered what the snowshoer had written in a notebook. Mr. Barlow was quoting Alexander Hamilton, who called the voting public a “great beast.” The great beast had spoken, I was thinking, while Em and Matthew went on hugging each other, and Carol kept watching the celebration at the pussy-grabber’s headquarters in New York. The way Matthew had to bend over Em when he hugged her made it appear he was whispering in her ear, but he spoke loudly enough for me to hear him, and Matthew was looking at me when he said what Em and I were only thinking to ourselves—we couldn’t have said it.

“I don’t really mean this, you know, but it’s a good thing Molly isn’t around—the pussy-grabbing would piss her off,” Matthew said, bursting into tears. All I could do was hug him and Em; I would have lost it if I’d tried to say anything. The three of us knew Molly had loved Bernie, but the old patroller wouldn’t have been a crybaby about it. Poor Carol. She knew what wrecks we were whenever one of us mentioned Molly. Carol had heard about my mother and the old patroller—“my two grandmas,” Matthew called my mom and Molly. Carol muted the volume on the Trump headquarters in New York, where the yahoos in coats and ties were still chanting for Hillary to be locked up. We could only imagine what Molly might have thought of Trump and his pussy-grabbing supporters.

In the summer of 2019, Em would be back in Barolo, where she’d last been at the Disastri Festival with Nora. We were both invited to the Collisioni Festival—the Collisions Festival was for writers and rock bands, but the damn déjà vu was in the air for Em. One night, for old times’ sake, it was expected we would attend a special showing of the Disastri documentary. “If old age doesn’t kill me, kiddo, the nostalgia could do it,” Em said. That July in Barolo, Em was almost eighty-four; I was seventy-seven. Some of Em’s pantomime fans were at the Disastri screening, where Em had to see and hear Nora as Anthony Quinn, talking about the dead-pudenda dance in Italian.

Matthew, who by then was twenty-eight, had flown with us to Milan; he had his own room where we were staying, at the Albergo dell’Agenzia in Pollenzo. He liked writers and rock music. The writers’ onstage interviews and the book signings were daytime events, the rock concerts at night—all in Barolo. The parties and dinners were in the surrounding area; everywhere we went, we were driven from and back to the Albergo. Our driver, Bella, was a beautiful young woman; she was a good driver. “I saw her first,” I whispered in Em’s ear, just to tease her—Em was usually quicker to say it than I was.