So she practised standing, at dawn, in winters when the gravel rang under her boots, in summers when the light came up so fast that practice was over before the rest of the range had unlocked the gate. She practised it through the years when her scores made her, briefly, a novelty — the instructor's daughter doing well, isn't that something, isn't that just like him — and through the years after, when novelty curdled into a kind of expectation so specific it had her father's name in it like a watermark. If she won, it was his teaching. If she lost, it was a pity he had not lived to correct whatever had gone wrong. Her own hands, in these tellings, were strangely uninvolved, although they were the hands on the rifle, and they shook, sometimes, in the car on the way home, with delayed and private fury.
There was one person who never told it that way, and she had learned to be careful about how much she needed him for it, because need was a way of handing your name to somebody else, too.
She was thinking, absurdly and completely, about none of this and all of it at once, years later, on a morning she did not yet know would divide her life into a before and an after that other people would be able to date. She was thinking about the girl of nine, whose card had said Did not flinch at the hard part, and who had written to Rose at Christmas for six years running and then stopped, as people do, because life enlarges. She was thinking about the boots by the back door, which Rose had at last given to a man from church whose feet were the same size, in an act of practical mercy that had made Willa cry in the pantry among the tins, where crying could be done at a normal volume among unjudging objects.
She was thinking about her father saying, to a whole bench of other people's children, that they would see which kind of person each of them was.
Back behind the line at the range, in the years when she had begun to qualify in her own right, there had been an afternoon — she kept returning to it while her life was being arranged into a final — when a committee man, kind, well-fed, certain, had rested a hand on her shoulder after a good card and said to the man beside him, not to her, "Tom Callen shoots again, eh?"
She had gone home and stood in the kitchen and repeated it to Rose in a voice she did not recognise.
Rose had not dried her hands that time. Rose had taken the cloth and wrung it, once, hard, over the sink, and said, "Then you'll have to shoot so they learn the rest of your name. Both parts of it are yours. He'd be the first to say so. He was vain about many things, your father, but he was never vain about that."
Whether Tom would have been the first to say so, Willa could no longer ask. That was the irreducible fact at the centre of it, the pin nobody could approach by asking. He was in a photograph laughing at the end of a joke. He was in a notebook in a drawer. He was in a pair of boots on another man's feet, walking a church path in February. He was in her hands, which were his in shape — the same long fingers, the same way of going quiet when a thing became serious — and which were not his at all, because they had held the rifle through seven years of mornings he had not seen, and had got better, and worse, and better again, entirely on their own time.
She was twenty-three years old. She had a mother who sent voice messages she saved and did not delete. She had a score in a final to shoot. She had been handed a rifle in front of a hundred phones by a smiling man who was sure of the ending, and she had been called, all her life, by a name that had another name hidden inside it.
She intended, on the gravel, in the standing position, in front of everyone, to find out what the second name weighed.
That spring, when the entry form for the State Standing Rifle Challenge had come through the post in an envelope with a window in it, as if it were a bill, she had left it on the kitchen table for three days, and Rose had left it there with her, in the way that Rose understood certain papers needed to be left alone to stop being frightening.
On the fourth evening Willa had sat down with a pen.
The form asked for her name in full, her club, and her qualifying scores, and then, at the bottom, in a smaller box that she would think about for longer than she admitted, it asked for the name of her coach or instructor, if any. It was an ordinary box. Shooters all over the state filled it in, or left it blank, or wrote in the name of a man at a club who checked their cards twice a year. It was not a trap. She understood, even while her hand stopped over it, that it was not a trap.
She wrote: Tom Callen, deceased.
Then she sat looking at the word deceased for a long time, because it was accurate and because she hated it, because it made the whole form read as if she were entering under a flag that had already been lowered.
Rose, passing with a basket of washing, stopped in the doorway.
"Cross it out," Rose said.
"I can't very well put nobody. It looks —"
"Put yourself," Rose said. "You've coached yourself since you were sixteen, in the cold, in the dark, with me making tea and pretending I wasn't listening at the window. Put your own name in your own box. Let them learn to copy it."
"It isn't how it's done."