Grace, I knew, had objected to the epigraph from the beginning. And now Em was hopping mad because Grace was opposed to anything in Em’s novel that sounded like, or could be perceived as, anti-Catholic. Em’s whole novel could be perceived as anti-Catholic—this was Grace’s editorial opinion. “The snowshoer and you were my editors—now it’s just you, kiddo,” Em told me.

Speech was relatively new to the formerly nonspeaking Em. I’d noticed she would experiment with how she wanted to sound—the way a teenager would try out different attitudes and voices. In her experiments, Em often spoke like Nora—kiddo was what Nora had called me.

“You and Nora were a stand-up act in a comedy club—your foremost objective wasn’t to offend no one,” Mr. Barlow had written Em. “Don’t let Grace make offending no one be the objective of your novel. Remember why you wanted to write Two Dykes, One Who Talks in the first place—not as nonfiction, but as a novel,” the snowshoer wrote. “In a novel, your foremost objective isn’t to offend no one,” the little English teacher told Em.

In the Denver airport, I was forever on the phone. Em had finished reading Mr. Barlow’s advance galleys of Bernard Nathanson’s The Hand of God. I knew Grace had got hold of the advance galleys, too. My chief concern was that Em would try to read aloud the entirety of Chapter 15, the last chapter in The Hand of God—the Catholic chapter. It would be a bad way for me to miss my flight to New York—hearing all about Bonkers Nathanson’s conversion to Catholicism. He wrote that he’d been having “lengthy conversations with a priest… for the past five years, and it is my hope that I shall soon be received into the Roman Catholic Church.”

God help Cardinal O’Connor if the son of a bitch baptizes Bonkers Nathanson, or some other craven convert to Catholicism—God help His Eminence if the son of a bitch gives Communion to another former infidel and repentant sinner, like my hateful father! I was expecting Em to say, but she didn’t.

“If Cardinal O’Connor baptizes Bonkers Nathanson, I might throw up,” was all Em said. She reminded me about one night at the Gallows when we were backstage—Damaged Don was there—and Nora was having one of her First Amendment fits.