For years, my mother would credit Hannes Schneider with this lifesaving technique—“a kind of Heimlich maneuver before Heimlich,” Little Ray liked to call it. Elliot Barlow never made this claim; it was just a trick some young ski instructor at St. Anton happened to know. Elliot would later express his doubts about the Heimlich maneuver. “Personally, I like to start with back slaps—then try the abdominal thrusts, then pound on the choker’s chest. I don’t count on the first thing working,” the little English teacher said.

What Elliot Barlow demonstrated that day was himself as a man of action; even though he didn’t initiate the unwatchable kiss, Mr. Barlow got the job done. He’d attracted my mom; with the probable exception of the near-to-death emeritus, no one at the dining-room table would ever forget how Little Ray had kissed the snowshoer. And Elliot Barlow saved the regressor emeritus from choking. Granddaddy Lew would live to die another day.

A great gob of food was expectorated onto the dining-room table. What the infant emeritus had choked on was no more identifiable than it had been before he’d tried to eat it.

“It looks like a potato, but it’s probably the pork,” Aunt Abigail said. It did not look like a potato; it resembled the first two phalanges of an adult index finger, but it had to be the pork.

In the throes of asphyxiation, the baby emeritus had filled his diaper; in shame, he lowered his head and pouted as Nana led him out of the dining room.

“When was one of you going to tell me about the diaper service?” my mother asked no one in particular, but she was looking straight at her sisters. “Does anyone in this family ever say what’s going on?”

“You should talk, Rachel—you of all people!” Aunt Abigail said.

“People in glass houses shouldn’t you-know-what, Ray,” Aunt Martha chimed in.

Uncharacteristically, my uncles had nothing to say. The kiss they’d seen and couldn’t watch was not a kiss anyone had bestowed on them—not even in their Tenth Mountain Division days, when they were alleged to be gallivanting around.

Best of all, my mom and the little English teacher were knocking back the beer and making plans to see each other again. It just so happened that the academy’s March break overlapped with mine. “I’ll be teaching in the ski school at Cranmore during Adam’s March break and yours,” my mother was saying to the snowshoer. “Maybe you and Adam can meet me in North Conway!” she said excitedly.

“If we have to, we can do something different with the sleeping arrangements,” Aunt Abigail informed them, sighing.

“We can put Mr. Barlow and Adam with Martin and Johan, in the boys’ bunk room,” Aunt Martha chimed in. “Then Abigail and I can sleep with you, Rachel.”