I certainly agreed with Molly—as a rule, you shouldn’t shoot other people’s children. It wasn’t lost on me that my mother and Molly seemed to think it was okay to shoot your own children, under certain circumstances, but this didn’t seem to be a good time to take up the matter with either of them. Besides, Molly handed me the unloaded shotgun; she wanted me to hide it for her. “Your mom knows me too well, Kid—she knows where I would hide it,” the trail groomer told me. “Just remember to tell me where it is after Zim has gone,” she added.

The twenty-gauge was unloaded; it was safe to hide it under the futon in the TV room. The way Zimmer was sleeping, I’m not sure he would have woken up if my mother had shot him. Breakfasts in Manchester were not as early in August as they were in the ski season, when we woke up in the darkness. The coffee grinder was always my alarm clock in Vermont. On his back, with his right hand on his heart—as if he were pledging allegiance to the flag—Zim slept as peacefully through the grinding of the coffee beans as he had with his cheek against the frigid window of our wrestling-team bus. A streak of sunlight slanted across his forehead, giving him a godlike or angelic appearance. I was watching him when his eyes opened. Zim woke up to the smell of coffee brewing; at the time, I believed this was a better way to wake up than having a deer slug just under the patella.

My mother didn’t speak at breakfast. When she allowed herself to look at Zimmer, her eyes would well with tears; then she immediately looked away. Zim seemed to understand and accept how my mom felt; when she let him, he held her hand. At breakfast, for the most part, Zimmer refrained from talking about the war, but he said one thing that upset my mother—it didn’t matter that Zim was trying to reassure her, in his ill-advised and slightly irritating way.

“By the end of this year, I’ll bet about fifteen thousand Americans will have died in Vietnam,” Zimmer began, “but hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese will be killed.” Those statistics would turn out to be fairly accurate, but statistics wouldn’t win the Vietnam War or reassure my mother. This time, my mom didn’t throw up in the kitchen sink; she just went to her bedroom and closed the door.

I hoped Zim wouldn’t discover the twenty-gauge under the futon in the TV room while he packed up his things. Back in the kitchen, where Molly and I hugged him and said our goodbyes, I had a hard time speaking to him. “Take care of yourself, Zim,” I barely managed to say.