Em reminded me that Henrik had married a second time, when he was in his forties; he’d had no children with his first wife, and only one with the second. Nora had hoped Henrik’s kid would be a girl. Henrik would have nothing to do with a daughter, Nora said—she meant a girl might have a fighting chance to be herself. If Henrik had a boy, Nora said, the poor kid would be like his father.

The boy was twentysomething when he and a lacrosse teammate took turns driving the U-Haul truck all the way to Vermont. Henrik had named him Johan, after his father, but the kid was a Johan in name only—he lacked the Norwegian’s good nature. I’d told Matthew the stories—how Henrik had bullied me, how Nora had bullied him back. Matthew was dying to meet Henrik, but Em and I doubted the old congressman would do the gunrunning himself. We wondered if young Johan might be one of the college boys. Henrik had written once more, only to me. “We call him Johnny,” Henrik wrote. “The Johan didn’t go over big, not down here.” That was the last I would hear from Henrik—not counting the consequences of his party’s policies.

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.