It was dismaying to me that Molly and my mother were happy to stash Henrik’s guns in their Manchester house. Molly once swore by her single-shot shotgun—her little twenty-gauge was the only gun my mom and Molly owned. “It’s a hard gun to shoot yourself with, accidentally,” Molly always said. (I liked the sound of that.) “No safety is safer than having a safety,” the ski patroller liked to say.

“We’re just keeping the guns for Henrik, sweetie—we’re not going to start a war, or anything,” my mother told me.

“I’m going to make a little more trouble for the deer, Kid—that’s the only trouble I’m making,” Molly assured me. In the stash of firearms, the trail groomer had seen a couple of deer rifles she wanted to try, and a twelve-gauge or two.

Henrik had been in the habit of coming to Manchester once a year to ski at Stratton, but he always spent one day skiing with my mom at Bromley. “Ray would ski with anyone, kiddo,” was how Nora put it. Henrik stayed in an inn in Manchester, not with Molly and my mother. (Henrik had always been wary of Molly.) Before the guns were in the picture, Henrik had flown to Boston or to Hartford, where he’d rented a car. It was a long drive to Manchester, Vermont, from down south. But now that the guns were with Molly and my mom, Henrik drove.

“One gun at a time—really?” I asked the night groomer and my mother. My uncles had so many guns, I calculated that Molly and my mom would die long before Henrik could drive those guns to Dixie, one at a time. Molly admitted that Henrik had been taking more than one gun at a time down south. Henrik had ski bags and boot bags. Henrik stuck a rifle or a shotgun in the ski bags—maybe one of each, my mother had observed—and he usually slipped a handgun in one of his boot bags. Even so, the arsenal of weapons was not visibly depleted. The closet in the TV room, where the pillows for the futon were stored, was full of rifles. “They’re not loaded, I hope,” I said, every time I slept on the futon—imagining myself shot by a falling rifle, in my sleep. The shotguns, I was told, now took up most of Molly’s side of their bedroom closet. I didn’t ask where the handguns were hidden, but I was careful how I opened drawers.