"You're Tom Callen's daughter, aren't you," they said, when she was twenty and qualifying, and they said it as a question although it was not a question, and she learned to answer it as information although it was not information either. It was a frame. She was to be hung inside it, straight, and admired, and not asked to be any larger than it.
Her mother heard it differently. Rose Callen, who worked in a school kitchen and came home smelling of steam and onions and the particular sweetness of fruit cooked for other people's children, would listen to Willa repeat some small, well-meant diminishing of the day — the official who had checked her entry twice, the man who had explained her own rifle to her, kindly, at length, while she held it — and Rose would dry her hands on a cloth and say, "They're not talking about you, love. They're talking about their grief, and your face is where it's standing. That doesn't make it your shift to work."
"Whose shift is it, then?"
"Nobody's, some days." Rose had a gift for unsentimental comfort. "Some days you just close the kitchen and go home."
Rose had kept more than the family going after Tom died. She had kept the arithmetic going, which was harder and less often praised. Entry fees did not sound like much in a committee meeting. They sounded like a figure. In Rose's kitchen they sounded like a shift swapped, a pair of shoes gone another season, a car repair persuaded rather than performed. Willa had not known, at fifteen, that her mother had taken Sunday work at a diner on the highway for four months to pay for a winter series, and Rose had not told her until she was nineteen, and then only because the diner had closed and Rose, clearing a drawer, had found a pay envelope and laughed at it before she could stop herself. That was the Callen way with sacrifice: it was discovered, later, by accident, like a note left in a coat pocket, and you were expected to understand that the not-telling had been part of the gift, and also, privately, its flaw.
Tom died on a Tuesday in February, which Willa always thought was the most Tom-like thing about it, because a Tuesday in February was when he did everything that mattered without an audience. He had taught a Saturday class in the rain the week before — eight kids, two of them in shoes that were not fit for the gravel, one of them a girl of nine who had cried at the first loud sound and then, by noon, had not cried, and had been so proud of not crying that Tom had written it on her card in pencil, in his small exact hand, under her score: Did not flinch at the hard part. Rose kept that story. The mother of the girl kept the card. Willa, for a long time, could not be in the same room as either of them without anger rising in her like weather, because how dare her father's goodness be so well distributed, out in the world in other people's drawers, when the portion of it that had lived in her own house had stopped on a Tuesday.
It had been his heart. A plain failure, said the doctor, using plain words, which Rose repeated plainly, because the Callens did not believe in decoration at the important moments. He had come in from the yard with an armful of wood, complained, not seriously, of feeling peculiar, and sat down in his own chair, and by the time Rose understood that peculiar had been a bigger word than the one he had meant to use, the moment for understanding had passed. He was fifty-one. He left a notebook, a rifle, a pair of boots by the back door that nobody moved for eleven months, and a range full of people who began at once, with love, to make his daughter into his memorial.
At the funeral the range committee spoke of continuing his work, and did, in their fashion. They named a junior prize for him. They put his photograph in the clubhouse, a good photograph, in which he was laughing at something off to the left, and for years Willa could not eat in that room, because the laugh was aimed forever at a joke she would never hear the end of. They invited her, at every prize-giving, to present the junior prize that bore his name, and she did it, and smiled, and handed a small bright cup to a succession of nervous children, and went home with the particular exhaustion of a person who has been publicly thanked for a relationship instead of a result.
What nobody at the range did, for a very long time, was ask her what she intended.
She intended, as it happened, to shoot standing.
That had been his truest lesson, and the one least represented in the clubhouse photograph. Tom had taught all positions to all comers, as an instructor must, but his private conviction, stated in the notebook and repeated at dawn when he thought only his daughter and the cold were listening, was that standing was the honest position because there was nowhere to hide. Behind a bench a shooter could outsource her steadiness to furniture. Prone, she could give it to the ground. Standing, a person kept accounts with herself, in public, with her own weight and her own breathing and her own wish to be elsewhere, and either the accounts balanced or they did not, and everyone could see the arithmetic.
"Any fool can be accurate lying down on a good day," he said, when she was thirteen and furious about a card that had gone wrong in a wind that would have ruined better shooters. "Standing tells you who you are on an ordinary one."