“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.

“When you can’t put anything anywhere without getting blood all over it, that’s a good time to come see us in Toronto,” Em told him. “Or you can bring the girls to Toronto, and they can bleed with us for a while—it may be your mom who’ll need a break from all the puberty that’s happening,” Em said. Then Em did a little puberty pantomime; it wasn’t too explicit for Matthew. Em just danced around, like she had her period coming on. She was singing her own version of the Jerry Lee Lewis song—“a whole lotta bleedin’ goin’ on,” she was singing—when Matthew started laughing, and he sang along with her. For now, the raging puberty wasn’t a problem.

Em and I had met Jeremy, and his girls. We liked them, too, and we wanted Grace to be happy. I knew the only song Em was seriously singing. Em really meant what she sang to me in my sleep, when she was brainwashing me—and now I was the one singing it. It’s not hard to learn “O Canada,” but I was trying to learn both the English and the French versions. I knew one day I would have to sing it. At my swearing-in ceremony, when I took the Oath of Citizenship, I would also sing my new national anthem.

For now, the old Norwegians’ guns had gone down to Dixie, but the old patroller was gone forever—not just down south. “In America, kiddo, the guns don’t ever go away—they just turn up somewhere else,” was the way Em put it.