“Let it go, Ray,” the night groomer said softly. “I wouldn’t fuck up that shot from the kitchen window—I use that twenty-gauge more than you do,” Molly reminded her.

This was true; Molly was the deer hunter in their family, she shot a deer every hunting season. She had a friend on the ski patrol who butchered it for her; Molly gave the patroller as many steaks or chops as he wanted, keeping the rest for herself and Ray. My mom had gone deer hunting with Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan. She was a good deerstalker, my uncles told her, and she clearly liked walking around in the woods with a gun; those two Norwegians loved her company, but they never understood why she missed every shot. Molly and I and the snowshoer knew why.

My mother purposely missed the deer, but she made a point of telling us how she always hit what she was aiming at. Both Molly and my mom liked that twenty-gauge—a lever-action, single-shot shotgun. Most deer hunters wouldn’t have chosen it; they would have wanted a rifle or a twelve-gauge, and more than one shot. But Molly swore by it. “My first shot is buckshot—that’ll knock a deer down,” the trail groomer had told me. “That little twenty-gauge is a cinch to reload. My second shot is a deer slug, the kill shot,” Molly said. Molly also liked how easy a gun it was for my mom to handle. “No safety is safer than having a safety,” the ski patroller liked to say about that single-shot twenty-gauge. “You have to cock it to shoot it—if it’s not cocked, it won’t fire. It’s a hard gun to shoot yourself with, accidentally,” Molly always said.

In the context of that cocktail party at the Exeter Inn, Lieutenant Matthew Zimmermann’s proposed salvation from a hero’s death in the Vietnam War must have been confounding to the adamant marine. Two lesbians—two dykes, two lickers—had told him they were prepared to shoot Matthew Zimmermann to save him from Vietnam. I decided to keep talking, before the undersize heavyweight thought of something to say. I quickly told the outraged but nonspeaking marine that my mother or Molly would have shot me, if I hadn’t been 4-F. I showed the small heavyweight my palms; the scars from the flexor-tendon surgeries were very visible. “Wrestling injuries to my fingers and hands—extensor tendons, too,” I was explaining to him, when my mom suddenly let go of the guy’s wrists. In her excitement to show him her hands, she almost hit him in the face.

“Look at my hands!” Little Ray cried. “Adam has my little hands, so I didn’t have to shoot him!” Molly was already hugging her when my mother started to sob. “You should have let me shoot Zim—both of you are to blame,” my mom blubbered to Molly and me.