The Morning I Asked for My Rifle

The Winter

The payments came on the first of every month like the sun coming up. December, January, February.

I never had to check. Kayla mentioned it once at the counter, smiling, like she knew a little something.

Corey mailed me a check in December for $756 with a note on lined paper that said, “Mrs. Martens, I didn’t know. I should have asked. I’m sorry.” It was signed with his whole name, like a schoolboy.

Chad worked every weekend for Dale through the whole winter. It was a hard one, with snow the second week of December and again over New Year’s and a stretch in January when it hit twenty below.

Amber said he’d come home so tired he fell asleep at the table.

The mill brought his hours back up to forty in February, when they picked up a new contract.

Amber texted me the news with three exclamation points, which is two more than she ever uses.

He kept working for Dale anyway. The extra money went to me, an extra hundred or two most months on top of the three hundred.

By March, between the rifle and Corey and the payments, a little over thirty-three hundred dollars had come back.

I would like to tell you I’d forgiven him all the way by then. I hadn’t.

Some days I’d see a new brown ring on the bedroom ceiling and think about Las Vegas, and I’d have to go out to the garage and sort nails for a while.

But I’d stopped telling the story to myself the angry way. That took most of the winter.

Forgiving somebody isn’t a thing you do once, I’ve found. It’s more like shoveling. You do it, and then it snows again, and you go back out.