Johnny called Grace’s number when the gunrunners got to Molly’s driveway. Grace’s parents had passed away; their house in Manchester was Grace’s now. Arthur Barrett had beaten the ball drop in Times Square; he’d permanently put his pajamas on before the ball could drop again. Grace and Matthew met the two lacrosse teammates in Molly’s driveway. When the old patroller died, I just knew I was done with Vermont and that driveway, where my mom’s mission of mercy was tragically averted.

Grace said the southern college boys were the worst male jocks imaginable. “They’re from a subculture of misogynist insouciance—women make them slouch,” Grace said.

“Lax bros,” Matthew called the gunrunners. Johnny sounded like he was a hundred percent Henrik.

“The chill attitude, the backward baseball caps—those boys would have beaten up Matthew if I hadn’t been there,” Grace went on.

“They would have raped you if I hadn’t been there!” Matthew told his mom.

“Don’t go there, Matthew—raging puberty is ahead of you. You’ll be there soon enough,” Grace said.

Em and I were staying away from the raging puberty business. We were in the East Sixty-fourth Street apartment, trying not to think about what had happened to the old patroller. We’d been moving to Toronto in a part-time fashion, mostly because we wanted to see as much of Molly in Vermont as possible. Em and I wanted to divide our time between Toronto and the snowshoer’s pied-à-terre for as long as Matthew was in school in New York.

“You two almost-Canadians will go the whole hog now, I imagine,” Grace had said to us. We knew the raging puberty business was Grace’s version of what was about to wreak havoc in her household. She’d met “someone serious,” as Grace put it. Jeremy was a younger man; he was also in publishing.

“You should definitely try a younger man—I like it better than I thought I would,” Em had told Grace.

Jeremy had two young daughters, not a lot younger than Matthew. “They soon will be starting puberty,” Grace had forewarned Matthew. For now, Matthew liked the girls, and he liked Jeremy. Matthew admitted to Em and me that his mom had made him anxious about his own puberty; the onset of the girls’ puberty sounded worse. Grace was projecting her experience with puberty onto the girls. She’d told me stories of her painful periods; she’d had terrible tampon problems. Poor Matthew was imagining these girls he’d met and liked—how they would be changed by their excruciating bleeding.

“The girls will soon be over puberty, as you will soon be over it,” I tried to assure Matthew, but he remained wary; his mother made it sound like puberty would be raging all around him. It was Em who got through to Matthew, by being funny about it.