“I love my parents—their writing, not so much,” Elliot earnestly said. “Their writing never exceeds the limitation of its genre, no matter what the Germans call Literatur; their writing is formulaic noir, but I love my parents nonetheless. I love them anyway.” Mr. Barlow’s eyes were locked on my mom’s throughout his heartfelt proclamation. While this was arguably not the declaration of love Little Ray had hoped to hear, she managed to mask her disappointment with an unfollowable tangent—a tactic familiar to me but baffling to Elliot, who had no previous experience with my mom’s method of changing the subject (again and again) until she ended up with the conversation she’d wanted to have in the first place.

Little Ray took the snowshoer’s face in her hands, pulling him closer. “Look at me,” she commanded him. “I would rather have altitude sickness than read anything. Oxygen deficiency is more interesting than writing—at least you feel something!” my mother cried. “Headache, nausea, swelling of the brain, even high-altitude flatulence—at least you can feel them!”

“All you can do is avoid alcohol and drink a lot of water,” Elliot told her with the utmost seriousness. “I find that eating dried apricots sometimes helps,” he added.

“Dried apricots make me fart more!” my mom cried.

“I meant that the apricots help with other symptoms of altitude sickness,” the little English teacher mumbled.

“I’ve heard that children born at altitude are abnormally small,” Aunt Abigail interjected.

“Maybe they just don’t develop,” Aunt Martha chimed in.

“My mother heard this, too,” Elliot calmly replied. “But she was also told that this was an old wives’ tale. And my birth weight was almost normal, though I was undersize.” My mom had not let go of his face. Out of customary politeness, Elliot had tried to look at my aunts when he spoke to them, but my mother wouldn’t let him turn his face away from her.

“Listen to me,” Little Ray said to the snowshoer. “You’re the handsomest man I’ve ever sat this close to. And you know what small does to me,” she said in her huskiest voice. Her lips almost touched Elliot’s ear. In his wildest dreams, he might have imagined she was going to kiss him. That was when my mom loudly said: “No man can be small enough for me, Elliot—or so I thought, before I met you.”

Even to me—at thirteen, a sexually inexperienced boy—it was shocking to hear the smallness of the snowshoer expressed in these terms, in the small enough for me way. I hoped no one would ask her to explain. I wished for an irrefutable ending.