The Morning I Asked for My Rifle

She wiped her face on her sleeve, the way she did when she was little. “Lily just wanted to know if she could still go to dance.”

We sat there while it got dark outside. The furnace came on.

Amber looked around my kitchen like she was seeing it for the first time, the coffee can on the counter, the milk on the bottom shelf.

“He did all this for you,” she said. “The milk. The storm door. He was doing all this for you, and the whole time he was taking your money.”

“Both things are true,” I said. “I’ve been trying to fit them together all week. I can’t. I think they just both are.”

Then my daughter, who has run a dental office for nine years and who could organize a church rummage sale for the whole county without breaking a sweat, pulled a notepad out of her purse and clicked her pen.

“Okay,” she said. “How much, exactly?” I gave her the number. She wrote it down and underlined it twice. “Okay. Here’s what’s going to happen.”

She worked it out right there at my table. Three hundred dollars a month out of their joint account, on the first, starting in December, transferred straight into my savings so nobody had to hand anybody an envelope.

“Corey pays his half of Vegas,” she said. “He already called Chad crying about it. He wants to. That’s about seven fifty. And whatever you get for that rifle comes off the top.”

“And he tells me every paycheck,” she said, tapping the pad. “Every hour. I see the stubs. That’s the part that’s for me, not for you. That’s the part I need.”

When she left, she hugged me at the door longer than she had since Ken’s funeral. “I’m still mad at you a little,” she said into my shoulder. “For the camp.”

“I know, honey,” I said. “You’re allowed.”

The Sporting Goods Store

On Monday I drove to Rhinelander with the rifle case on the back seat. I’d never sold a gun in my life. Ken did all of that.

I had to ask Marcy’s husband how it worked, and he said just bring your driver’s license and let them make you an offer.

The man at the gun counter was about my age, with reading glasses on a cord around his neck.

His name tag said Steve. I laid the case on the glass and said, “I’d like to sell this back, if you’ll take it.”

He unzipped it. I looked out the window at the parking lot while he did.

I heard him work the bolt, and I heard him hum a little, the way men do when they look at something they like.

“Somebody hardly shot this,” he said. “One box, maybe. Scope’s still got the lens caps on.” He checked a number on the side against something in his computer. “We sold this in August.”

“My son in law bought it,” I said. “With my money. He’s giving it back to me, and I’m giving it back to you.”

Steve looked at me over his glasses for a second. I think he understood more than I said, because he didn’t ask anything else. He just nodded and pulled a form out of a drawer.

“I can do eleven hundred,” he said. “That’s a fair number for used, and better than I’d give most. I’m sorry it’s not more. It never is, once it leaves the store.”

Eleven hundred out of eighteen hundred and fifty. I did the math in my head, the way I used to figure how many pans of bars for a staff meeting.

Seven hundred and fifty dollars lost just for walking out the door with it.

“That’s fine,” I said. “That’s fair.” He wrote down my license number in his book and handed me a check.

I folded it in half and put it in my coat pocket and drove it straight to the bank, where Kayla deposited it to savings and didn’t ask a thing either.