“I found a photograph of your mom—it was under some old ski pants she never wore,” Molly told me in the kitchen, where the photo was displayed in a bowl of apples on the counter, a safe distance from the stovetop and the chopping block.

In the black-and-white photo, I recognized the sweater and the matching ski hat, but the sweater was too tight on my mother, and the pom-pom on the ski hat was too feminine for the jock look my mom had most admired in her late teens and early twenties. In the shabbiness of the dark Victorian bedroom with the tall windows, I could discern what would become the restored Hotel Jerome. Molly hadn’t found the photo under the ski sweater my mom was wearing in Aspen in 1941—when Little Ray was eighteen, almost nineteen.

I’d seen the sweater before; it was too big for the shoulders of the small snow shoveler, and the pom-pom on the hat was too girlish for a boy, although my mother had told Molly and me that the boy who couldn’t take his eyes off her would have been a pretty girl.

“I’m guessing it was the ski sweater and the hat your mom gave to that boy who was a little smaller than she was—the one she didn’t say she slept with, not at first,” Molly reminded me. “You remember, don’t you, Kid?” the old patroller asked me.

“I remember,” I said.

“I’m just guessing, Kid, but if you showed Paul Goode this picture, he would remember Ray—and her sweater and hat,” Molly said.

In the black-and-white photo, my mother is the smallest and youngest of her fellow skiers crowded into one bedroom at the Jerome; a teammate must have snapped the picture. Little Ray is the only skier looking at the camera; she’s smiling, as if she were posing for a portrait in the chaos of her teammates’ disarray.

At eighteen, my mom’s calmness and the naturalness of her smile made Molly and me imagine that my mother had already made up her mind. “Aspen—March 1941,” Little Ray had written on the back of the pic.

“Look at her smile—she’s already met him, Kid,” the old patroller told me in the kitchen. We could hear Matthew shrieking, while Em tried on Little Ray’s clothes. Molly meant that my mom had spotted the kid who could be my father, she’d seen that boy who wasn’t yet shaving—the one who would give her what she wanted, her one and only, with no strings attached.