“I’m sorry, Granddaddy,” I said to him. As the real ghosts would one day teach me, it is difficult to look at someone who is disappearing. I closed my eyes; I didn’t open them again until I heard the familiar creak on the attic stairs. The diaper man’s smell took longer to drift away. Real ghosts, I would later learn, don’t always drift away.

In the seventeen months before their wedding, my mother and the snowshoer got to know each other, and I got to hang out with them. We would spend two March breaks and one Christmas vacation together—all up north, conspicuously not with all the North Conway Norwegians. I can’t keep straight the names of the trails on Cranmore Mountain where Elliot Barlow and I were allowed to snowshoe, but Elliot knew all the Austrians there, and he could talk to them in German.

There was an Arlberg run; there was a Skimeister and a Lower Skimeister, too. Of course there was a Kandahar and a Schneider. The names didn’t matter to me; I didn’t learn them. I never knew the name of the trail we were on. I just followed the snowshoer; up or down, I matched his stride. Elliot Barlow taught me to lengthen my stride—not only on snowshoes, but also when we ran together. Naturally, with my longer legs, I could soon overtake him—as a runner, and as a snowshoer. But, out of respect—later, out of love—I didn’t, or I wouldn’t, overtake him. You’ll remember I had a history of this: even with a good ski instructor, I’d maintained a beginner-to-intermediate appearance.

Elliot Barlow brought my mom and me together; the snowshoer made us a family. Elliot made it possible for my mother and me to separate ourselves from the tyranny of those Brewster girls. I began to see that Nora had been right about my grandmother. Didn’t her passivity—Nana’s ineffectual “Girls, girls”—enable my aunts’ bitchery? Their nonstop scrutiny of my mom’s sleeping arrangements was invasive. Aunt Abigail repeatedly asked me about our accommodations at the inn in North Conway.

“We don’t care if it’s European,” Aunt Martha chimed in.

“It’s cozy,” I told them. “One of the other guests is an Austrian.”

“We don’t care if it’s cozy, or about the Austrian,” Aunt Abigail said. “Just tell us about your rooms, Adam.”

“Just stick to who sleeps with whom, Adam, and in what kind of bed,” Aunt Martha chimed in.

I’d read Great Expectations twice. I was reading more Dickens; the snowshoer had given me his teacher’s copy of David Copperfield. I was beginning to imagine myself as a fiction writer.

“Mr. Barlow calls the inn a Gasthaus,” I began—this much was true.

“We don’t care what Mr. Barlow calls it, Adam!” Aunt Abigail protested.