There were so many guns, not even Henrik could keep track of them. Henrik had told my mom and Molly that they could give some guns away—if they wanted to, if they had any friends or loved ones who wanted any. “You can’t give away a gun in Manchester, Kid—they sell any kind of gun you could want in a gas station in town,” Molly told me. I knew the gas station; I’d seen all the guns.

My mother tried to give guns to the snowshoer and me, and to Nora and Em. My mom was convinced we needed guns to be safe in New York. On the contrary, Mr. Barlow argued—for two people living in a small apartment, it would be unsafe to have a gun.

“Elliot is so quiet, even when she is moving around—I would mistake her for an intruder and shoot her,” I said.

“You should each have your own gun, sweetie,” my mom said.

“So we can shoot each other?” I asked her.

“Adam gets up to pee at night—I would surely shoot him if I had a gun, Ray,” the snowshoer said.

Nora had said that a handgun (or two) was the only kind of weapon you would want to have in a New York City apartment. “In New York, I’ll bet you could be arrested just for carrying a rifle or a shotgun from your parking garage to your apartment,” Nora pointed out. Growing up with all those guns, it was a wonder Nora and Henrik hadn’t shot each other. Now that half the guns belonged to Nora, she was surprisingly picky about choosing the gun (or guns) she wanted. Nora was uncharacteristically judicious; she wanted Em to learn to shoot before Nora took any guns to their rat’s-ass apartment above the perennially bad restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen.

When Nora and Em visited my mom and Molly in Manchester, Molly took Em shooting in a quarry outside of town. There were safe things you could shoot at in the quarry; everyone went there for target practice, Molly said. This was a safer bet than turning Em loose with a handgun on Ninth Avenue on the West Side of Midtown Manhattan, Nora said. Molly told us that Em had “taken to” shooting at things in the quarry.

Whenever we went to see my mother and Molly, Elliot and I refused to take a gun back to New York with us. “You should take two,” my mom always told us. She was already mad at us for taking our cross-country skis to the city. We’d never wanted the skis in the first place; in Vermont, Elliot and I preferred snowshoeing. But sometimes when it snowed in New York City, they closed Park Avenue to traffic. It was magical to ski at night on Park Avenue in the falling snow, but my mother was mad that we wouldn’t ski with her in Vermont.