“You should live with Em,” Grace kept telling me; she kept telling Em we should live together, too. “You two fiction writers are nomads—it doesn’t matter to you where you live,” Grace told us. “If you tried living together, you two might actually be happy for a change,” Grace said in that sure-of-herself, New Yorker way.

My soon-to-be-ex-wife had inserted herself as a matchmaker for Em and me. “If you and Em are together, that would be the best transition for Matthew—he knows and loves you both—and, at your age, it doesn’t really matter that you and Em don’t have sex, or if one day you manage to find a way to do it,” Grace told me. “Em is over sixty, you know, and you’re fifty-four,” Grace said. Grace was going on forty. She didn’t seem to be concerned about her own circumstances—I mean, regarding what would be the best transition for Matthew. While we agreed we would sell the East Dorset house, Grace was evasive about where she and Matthew would live—whether they would stay in Vermont or move to Manhattan. “You and Em might as well live in New York—you’ll probably end up there, eventually,” Grace said; she sounded more certain about what Em and I should do than she did about her and Matthew.

“I also have to think about Molly,” I reminded Grace.

“Molly is seventy-five, almost seventy-six,” was all Grace said about Molly, as if the old patroller were too old to bother about.

Em and I were worrying about Molly when we invited ourselves and Matthew to an early dinner at the Manchester house, one night when Grace was in New York. “I’ll bet Molly has surrounded herself with your mother’s clothes—she’s probably sleeping with your mom’s clothes. A week after Nora died, you can bet your ass I was sleeping with her clothes,” Em told me.

Molly told us to come ahead of dinner time—then I could help her with the cooking. When Em and Matthew and I arrived, we saw neat piles of Little Ray’s clothes on the futon in the TV room and on the bed in Molly and my mom’s bedroom. The piles were well organized—the pants with other pants, the long-sleeved jerseys and turtlenecks together, the blouses separated from the skirts and sweaters. If the old patroller had been sleeping with my mother’s clothes, she was over it. The clothes were for Em to try on. While Molly and I were in the kitchen, Matthew had fun dressing Em—or, as Matthew put it, “helping her” try on his grandmother’s clothes.