At nine, Willa's one thing was the front edge of the target frame, a bright nick in the metal that caught the sun. At eleven, it changed. At fourteen, in the first year she was old enough to be scored without a discount for being small and somebody's daughter, it changed again, and she cried in the truck coming home because she thought changing it meant she had lost the knack, and Tom, at a red light, in the patience he reserved for real distress rather than performance, explained that the thing would move as she grew, and the discipline was not the thing itself. The discipline was the choosing, and the returning. "You'll spend your life returning," he said. "Everyone thinks it's about never wandering off. Lord, Willa. Wandering off is the human condition. It's about knowing the way back and not making a song and dance about the journey."
They practised at dawn because Tom's volunteer hours were fitted around a paid job with the county, and because, he said, dawn told the truth before the day started lying about temperature. Willa's dawns, from twelve to seventeen, had a liturgy she could still recite in her hands: the cold key, the gate chain, the kettle in the hut that took nine minutes and tasted of tin, her father's pencil moving down a card, the range empty and enormous, the mountains far off still deciding on their colour. She learned to stand in a wind off the desert that worried her shirt and her hair and, once, took her cap clean to the fence, and to let the wind be weather. She learned to shoot with a coach from another club shouting corrections at his own boy two lanes down, with a dog barking itself hoarse at a delivery van, with girls from school, who had come once out of curiosity, whispering behind the line in the voices of people who believed whispering was private. She learned it with her father dying, though neither of them had that word in the house yet. That winter he was thinner inside his jacket and the pencil sometimes stopped, mid-card, for reasons he called thinking. The dawns did not stop. If anything they became gentler, which frightened her more than the pencil. He corrected less. He watched more. One morning, very cold, the light the colour of pewter, he stood behind her for a long time without saying anything at all, and when she finally lowered the rifle and looked round, put out because silence from Tom Callen was a new and uncalibrated instrument, he said, "There it is. That's yours now. Doesn't need me standing in it."
He died that spring, between one season and the next, efficiently, as if to spare the range a fuss, and the funeral had a guard of honour of teenagers in ironed shirts who did not know where to put their hands.
Rose took the second job that autumn, cleaning at the hospital in the evenings, and the arithmetic of the house narrowed to a pencil line. Willa offered, at sixteen, in the full drama of sixteen, to stop. Stop the fees, stop the travel, stop being an expense with a hobby other people's sons did professionally. Rose was scraping a pan at the sink and did not turn round, which was how Willa knew she had said something that mattered. "Your father," Rose said, "did not spend ten years teaching other people's children for free so that his own could quit at the first bill. Eat your dinner. We'll manage, because managing is what we do, and don't insult us both by calling it sacrifice where I can hear you." They managed. It involved Rose's feet swelling in her shoes by Friday. It involved entry fees appearing in Willa's bag in envelopes with no note, and once, memorably, a cheque from the range committee's hardship fund that Willa tried to refuse and Chief Hargrove, younger then and already practising being unimpressed, pushed back across the table with two fingers. "It's a fund, Willa. Funds are for using. Your father put money in it for other people's girls. Take it and shoot straight, that's the paperwork." She kept every receipt. She intended, with the whole force of a private religion, to pay that fund back one day with interest it had never asked for. It was among the things she let be weather, but it was weather she had memorised the sound of, like rain on a particular roof.
After Tom died, the dawn practice changed its nature, and for a year it nearly finished her. Grief, Willa discovered, is not weather, no matter what a notebook says. Grief is climate. It was in the gate chain and the tin kettle and the ninth minute. It was in the empty place behind her on the line where a man's silence had once been a form of company. She shot badly, then angrily, then mechanically, chasing her father's voice in her own instructions until the instructions curdled into scolding, and her scores fell apart in the specific, humiliating pattern of a person trying to be accompanied. Rose, who had no technique to offer and therefore offered the only thing that works, began leaving a voicemail on the mornings of competitions, although they lived in the same house, although Willa was usually in the next room. That was the joke of it, and then it stopped being a joke and became the ritual. Rose's voice, recorded, unembarrassed, practical as bread: "It's your mother, in case the uniform fools you. Eat after. Stand up straight, you're slouching in my head. Whatever happens, happen at it properly, and come home for tea. There's cake if it's a disaster, and there's cake if it isn't, I'm not running a system based on results."