The Rifle Grandpa Left For My Boy

Jared kept the rifle in his gun safe the whole time. He said a boy like Mason should not have a rifle at his mother’s house, and I did not argue, because the safe was a good one and my house is small. Every Saturday morning Jared handed it to my dad. Every Saturday afternoon my dad handed it back.

Seventeen Saturdays. I counted them later on the calendar by my phone.

And now the rifle was in his stepson’s hands, or close to it, because I could see the case on the tailgate of Jared’s truck behind Bud. Bud kept looking at it and then looking at me and then looking at the concrete.

“He practiced all summer, Jared,” I said. “With that gun.”

“He practiced shooting paper,” Jared said. “Shooting paper is not sitting in the cold for six hours. You know what he’s like. Something goes wrong, a squirrel goes wrong, and he’s screaming in a tree stand with a loaded rifle. Dad was sick at the end. He wasn’t thinking about any of that.”

He said it reasonably. That was the worst part. He said it like a man who had thought it through and come out the other side feeling responsible.

Behind me, I heard the truck window go down another inch.

I want to tell you I said something perfect. I did not. I stood in that driveway with my keys digging into my palm and I thought about the next five minutes very carefully, the way you think about a stretch of road you know is icy.

If I raised my voice, Mason would come apart. Not a little. The kind where he hits his own head against the dashboard and I have to hold his wrists, and afterward he sleeps for fourteen hours and does not talk for a day. If that happened tonight, there would be no opening morning for him at all. Jared would not even have to win.

And what was I going to win anyway? A fight over a dead man’s rifle, in a driveway, at four o’clock on the night before opener? The case was already on his tailgate. Bud’s mother was watching from the kitchen window. There was no version of that argument where my son ended up in his grandfather’s stand at daylight.

So I made a decision right there on Jared’s concrete, and I have not been sorry for it once.

You cannot win a fight over a dead man’s gun in a driveway the night before opener. You get your boy to the stand.

“Okay, Jared,” I said.

He blinked. I think he had a whole second speech ready.

“Okay?”

“Okay,” I said again, and I turned around and walked back to my truck.

Mason did not say anything when I got in. He had his hands flat on his thighs, the way his therapist taught him in fourth grade, pressing down to feel where his body was. His jaw was working. I backed out of the driveway slow and kept my eyes on the mirror.

Bud was still standing in the garage door. He lifted one hand, halfway, like he was not sure he was allowed to wave. Then Jared said something to him and he went inside.

We drove a mile before Mason spoke.

“A kid who can handle it,” he said. He said it in Jared’s voice, exactly, the pitch and the pause and everything. He does that with sentences that hurt him. He says them over and over until they wear smooth.