The door had shut on Brandon’s father and Greta. His last image, absurd and yet prescient, had been her marching down the creaking staircase of Brandon’s then-home, the small, loathed rental house that had been all his mother and Llewelyn could afford. He had watched, his mind buzzing, refusing to settle on any one thought, watched as she steadily and heavily proceeded down the steps and through the dining room, carrying — in all its multilayered irony – a rifle.  Had she actually slung its strap over his shoulder, Brandon could not have stopped himself from bursting into a wet, teary, manic laughter.

It had not, of course, been an actual, functional, lethal rifle, or even a weapon; it was an M1 Garand training rifle, retrieved from his father’s old bedroom, that he had played with as a boy. His initials were still visible on the stock, where he had carved them. Its barrel protruded harmlessly from a solid, carved block of wood, and the trigger merely made a vaguely disappointing CLACK when squeezed.

Brandon had loved it; his mother, since seeing him gleefully carrying it from his father’s car when he had dropped him off after their last trip to Buffalo, had greeted it with dismay and no little disgust. She hated weapons; hated the very idea of them — she and Llewelyn considered themselves pacifists. And yet they had, at varying points in Brandon’s childhood, indulged his fascination with weapons; among the worn and battered toys in his room was a small collection of harmless pistols, and the Corgi tank that he had gotten (from his father) on his ninth birthday.

Llewelyn, it turned out, had felt more strongly, and had refused to buy Brandon any toy, or model kit, that was even peripherally military.  In his earliest years, Brandon had greeted this with the kind of resentment that only a child’s reptilian mind for acquisition could breed, occasionally seeking to deliberately irked Llewelyn by painting in clumsy military camouflage colors the trucks, airplanes, and camper van models he had bestowed on him. The final straw had been a plastic model of a bird — specifically, a dove — which Brandon had slathered in olive drab and Air Force decals, and to which he had attached missle launchers, harvested from his huge box of old model carcasses, to the graceful feathered wings.

Llwelyn had looked at it, and burst out laughing. “It’s a DoveHawk!” he had cried, turning it around in his hands while his mother was doubled over in a nearby chair, barely able to speak. So had gone Brandon’s occasional gestures toward rebellion — conceived in moments of indignation; infused with mischief, offered up with a wink; received with grace. He had not seen, then, on that and on many such occasions, all that this meant — that what Brandon had been told was that genuine conviction, and belief, could laugh; could admit to its limitations. And he had also not realized how rare that would prove to be.