The Morning I Asked for My Rifle

Opening Morning

So that was how I came to be standing by his pickup with my hand out at a quarter after six, with the sky just going gray behind the balsams and the frost on everything.

Chad looked at my hand. He looked at the fire, where his brother and his uncle were very carefully not looking at us.

Then he looked at his boots, the same way Owen does when he’s been caught.

“What rifle?” Uncle Dale said, without looking up. His voice was flat and calm, and it carried in that cold air the way voices do before the sun is up.

Chad didn’t answer him. He opened the back door of his truck, reached behind the seat, and pulled out a zippered tan rifle case.

He stood there holding it in both arms like it weighed a hundred pounds.

His dad’s old Remington, the one he’d hunted with since he was twelve, was leaning against the cabin wall by the door.

He hadn’t been planning to carry the new one at all. He told me later he hadn’t been able to make himself.

“Mom,” he said, and his voice cracked. “There’s something Amber doesn’t know either. There’s something nobody knows.” His hands on that case were shaking, and it wasn’t the cold.

“Then you’d better tell it,” I said. Not loud. I have never been loud. Thirty-one years with a line of hungry kids taught me loud doesn’t work half as well as waiting.

He let out a long breath that hung in the air. “The mill cut my hours in February. They lost the big contract with the co-op. Forty hours down to twenty-eight, and no overtime. A bunch of us got cut.”

Uncle Dale looked up then. Corey did too. Dale got up off his log by the fire ring, slow and deliberate.

“I didn’t tell Amber,” Chad said. “I told her they changed the shift around. That’s why I was off at two. The checks were short, and I kept thinking it’d come back in a month, and I’d make it up before she noticed.”

“So you used my card,” I said.

“I used your card.” He couldn’t look at me. “First it was just our groceries with yours, so the checks would cover the house payment. Then it was gas. Then cash for the truck payment when I was short.”

“And the rifle?” That was Dale, walking over now, his boots crunching on the frost.

He stopped a few feet off, a big man with a gray mustache and a face like a closed barn door.

Chad shut his eyes. “That was the dumbest thing I ever did. I had a bad week. I went into the store in Rhinelander just to look, and I walked out with it. I hadn’t bought myself one thing in two years.”

“And Vegas,” I said.

Corey made a sound like somebody had stepped on his foot. “You told me you got a safety bonus,” he said to his brother. “You said it was a bonus. You said don’t worry about it, it’s on the mill.”

“I promised you that trip a year ago,” Chad said, still not looking up. “For your thirty-fifth. Dad always said we’d go when you turned thirty-five, and he never got to. I couldn’t make myself call it off.”

Nobody said anything for a while. The fire popped. Somewhere off in the woods a truck door slammed, and then another, the sound of a whole county going out to its stands.