Willa played it before every scored final for six years. In motel rooms where a team-mate's television muttered through the wall. In a borrowed car outside a regional ground with rain hammering the roof in a month when rain in the desert made the local paper. Once, memorably, in a toilet cubicle at a championship where the women's final had been scheduled as an afterthought and a man outside was explaining to his son that the girls shot a shorter card, which they did not, and Willa stood with her forehead nearly touching the door and Rose's voice in one ear saying come home for tea, and laughed, actually laughed, alone, and went out and won that final by a margin that puzzled the man's son into a respectful silence she treasured for months. The voicemail was not magic. She was a grown woman of twenty-three with a scorecard history and a clear-eyed view of superstition, her father's daughter in that too. The voicemail worked because it put the voices in their proper order. Rose first, living, unimpressed, feeding people. Tom behind her, in a margin, in pencil. Everybody else — committees, cameras, men explaining her own event to their sons outside toilet doors — weather.
There was a winter, the winter she was twenty, when the work narrowed to something so plain it bored other people to hear about, and those were the months that made her, though she would never have put it like that, because making, in her family, was a word for bread and furniture, not for people. She was working by then herself, mornings in the school kitchen alongside Rose, afternoons sometimes in the range office for Hargrove, who paid her in money and in access to the empty line at closing time. Every evening that the range was hers alone, she did one exercise and one only, the exercise Tom had set her at fourteen and that she had once thought a punishment for talking back. She would stand at the line with the rifle unloaded at first, and later, in scored practice, live, and she would practise returning. Not shooting better. Returning. She would let a sound arrive — the office radio, a gate, a car door out on the road, a memory, which is a sound the body makes without permission — and she would notice that her attention had gone visiting, and she would bring it back to one thing only, without anger, the way you bring a dog back without anger, because anger is just another visit. A hundred returns in an evening. Some evenings two hundred, on the bad ones, the ones after a letter from a college she could not afford or a committee meeting where a man had called her Tom while asking for the minutes. She counted returns, not hits. The card at the end of those evenings was often ordinary, and once, in February, it was superb, and she drove home through the dark suspicious of the superb card in exactly the way Tom would have prescribed, because a superb card on a practice night is weather too, and houses do not chase weather in either direction.
What was her one thing, by the final morning, after all those years of it moving? She had not told anyone, not Rose, not the notebook, and she would not have told this story's reader at gunpoint, which at a shooting range is saying something. It was not the plate. It was not, God forbid, the famous pin at the plate's dead centre, that little raised round head of metal that men had been failing to strike clean for thirty-one years and had built into a mythology complete with its own jokes at the clubhouse bar; aiming at a legend, Tom would have said, is a good way to shoot a legend's shadow and miss the metal entirely. Her one thing was smaller, duller and entirely hers, a thing with no mythology and no resale value to cameras. It was a place where light did a particular thing. It was enough. On bad mornings it was a discipline. On good ones it was almost, though she distrusted the word, a rest.
The other discipline of that winter had been people. Danny Mercer was not the first man to hand her something with a smile that had a hook in it, and the range, God love it, had been handing her things with hooks since she was tall enough to sweep. There was the coach, not Ray Mercer, another one, a decent man by his own lights, who patted the bench beside him at a training day and explained, while she was standing with her rifle, that the standing game was a young man's discipline really, because of the core, because of the weight, because of a dozen becauses that all wore the same face. There was the official who entered her, twice, under her father's name on the start list, Thomas Callen, and corrected it with a laugh and no apology, and she shot that day under her own misspelled name with a fury she had to let be weather one breath at a time, which she considered, afterwards, the best shooting education of her life and would not have traded for a cleaner one. There was the photographer, last season, who asked her to hold the rifle "more across" for a better picture, and understood, from something in her face, that he had asked a plumber to hold a wrench more across, and apologised, and photographed her as she was, and it was the best picture anyone had taken of her, Rose said, because she looked like she was doing something. Willa had filed them all, not in bitterness, which is a heavy thing to carry onto a firing line, but in the notebook's other sense: as climate reports. You do not curse rain. You read it, you dress for it, you stand in it if standing is the work, and you keep your one dry room in the middle of you where a small, honest thing can be looked at.
So on the morning of the final, at the kitchen table, after the toast, Rose looked at her daughter across the narrow room and performed the last act of the ritual, which was to treat the day as ordinary. "Shirt's creased," she said.
"It's a range shirt, Mother. Creasing is its natural state."