The Morning I Asked for My Rifle

What I Said

I want to tell you what I said next exactly right, because I’ve thought about it a good deal, and because I’ve been told since that I should have said more, and by other people that I said too much.

“Chad, I didn’t drive out here to shame you in front of your family,” I said. “I came out here because you wouldn’t come to me. I gave you a week, and you texted me to wait until after the season.”

“I know,” he said. “I know.”

“You’re the father of my grandchildren. I’m not calling the sheriff, and I’m not calling anybody. That was never going to happen. But I want my money back, and Amber has to know, and she has to hear it from you.”

“Today,” I said. “By supper. If I don’t hear from her by nine o’clock tonight, I’ll go over there myself and tell her, and I’ll tell her I gave you every chance first.”

He nodded. Then he held out the case. I didn’t take it right away.

I just looked at it, that tan case with the zipper running down the side, and I thought about my roof.

“Please take it,” he said. “I don’t want it. I haven’t wanted it since the day I bought it. I put one box of shells through it at the gravel pit, and I felt sick the whole time.”

I took it. It was heavier than I expected. I didn’t unzip it. I didn’t want to see it.

I walked it around to my back seat and laid it down there like something asleep.

When I turned around, Dale was standing next to Chad with his hand on the back of his neck, the way you’d hold a dog that’s been in the road. He wasn’t squeezing. He was just holding on.

“Why didn’t you come to me?” Dale asked him, low. “You knew I’d have helped you. Your dad would’ve skinned me if I hadn’t.”

“Because you’d have known,” Chad said. “Everybody would have known.” And he started crying right there by the truck, a thirty-eight-year-old man in a camouflage jacket, with his little brother and his uncle and his mother in law standing in the frost.

I didn’t go to him. I wanted to, a little, and I didn’t. Some things a man needs his own people for.

Corey went and stood on his other side, and the three of them stood together in a row with their backs to the fire.

“Go hunt,” I said. “Shooting light’s in ten minutes. Go sit in your stand and think about what you’re going to say to my daughter.”

Then I got in my car and drove back down the field road with my heart going like a sewing machine.

Amber

Amber called at four thirty that afternoon. She didn’t say hello. She said, “Mom, I’m coming over,” and hung up, and twenty minutes later she was standing in my kitchen in her coat with her eyes swollen.

She didn’t sit down at first. She stood by the counter where Chad used to leave the receipts and said, “You went out to camp? You went out there in front of Dale and Corey? Mom, why didn’t you just call me?”

It was the question I’d been asking myself all day. I pulled out a chair for her and told her the truth: that I had wanted it to come from him, and that maybe I’d done it wrong, and I’d live with that.

“You knew for a week,” she said. “A whole week, and you didn’t tell me.”

She sat down then, hard, and put her face in her hands. “He’s been lying to me since February. February, Mom.”

I made coffee, because that’s what I know how to do. I set the coffee cake out, the one I’d baked for Chad on Wednesday. She didn’t touch it. I didn’t either.

“He sat the kids down in the living room,” she said after a while. “He told them he made a big mistake with Grandma’s money and that he’s going to fix it. Owen asked if he was going to jail. Owen’s nine, Mom.”

“What did Chad tell him?” I asked.

“He said no, because Grandma didn’t want that. He said Grandma was being kinder to him than he deserved.”