Willa made herself watch the plate and not the man who was watching the plate. It was a refinement of discipline she had not anticipated needing, and it cost her more than the shot had. To look at Hargrove's face would be to beg the result out of him before he had finished seeing it, and she had not walked out onto this gravel carrying her mother in an envelope of saved shift-money and her father in a pen in her breast pocket in order to beg. Look at one thing only. The plate was her one thing. The plate refused to change. The sun made its top edge burn in her unaided vision, a wire of light.
Seconds built themselves into a structure. Four. Perhaps seven. Time on a range is measured differently by the person who has shot and the people who have only heard.
Behind the lenses — though she could not know this yet, though she would hear it described later that day and again at the inquest of celebration that the town would hold over the result for years — the magnified world had resolved itself with a cruelty of clarity. Rust, pits, sand spatter, the scoring ghosts of the morning. And at the centre, small and round and insultingly exact, a bright disc where there had been no bright disc in anyone's lifetime of looking at it: the head of the dead-centre pin, struck clean, its surface freshly scarred into light.
Hargrove had not yet lowered the binoculars. That was what the crowd would remember when they told it, and Willa, who missed his face in the moment because she had forbidden herself to look, would have to take their word for it forever. His hands held the big black instrument steady. His mouth, witnesses agreed, did something uncharacteristic and therefore unforgettable. It opened, slightly, the way the mouths of very old, very controlled men open when the world has finally, after decades of behaving, produced a novelty and presented it without any warning at all.
But that was the other end of the lane of looking. At Willa's end, there was gravel and heat and a held-back smile and one shot away on the sheet, and the chief's strap still creaking as his elbows settled, and no verdict yet. She flexed nothing. She re-settled the rifle in her hands, not raising it, just taking its weight in the patient attitude of a person who has more work in front of her and intends to be ready for it, and she waited — for the binoculars to come down, for Grant's voice on the amplifier, for whatever truth the plate was keeping at distance to begin, officially, to travel back up the lane toward the woman who had sent for it.
"Hold," Grant said softly into the amplifier, forgetting, perhaps for the only time in his stewardship of that table, to sound neutral. "Everybody just — hold."
So they held. The crowd, the cameras, the heat. Danny, with his water bottle still untouched and his good follow-through still hanging in the air between them. Hargrove, behind his lenses, looking at the one bright point. And Willa Callen, standing alone, her crosshair-heart still ticking in her ribs like a metronome that would not be hurried, learning in real time how long a single shot could be.
In the held second that followed, memory did what memory always did when her body was occupied and her hands were forbidden their impatience. It brought her the shed behind the family house when she was fifteen, and Tom Callen sitting on an upturned crate with a rifle across his knees that was not loaded and was never loaded indoors, teaching her the liturgy of cleaning and care the way some men teach scripture — by repetition, by correction, by refusing to make the words grander than the work. He had let her fail at a target once that whole summer, a plate not unlike this one and at a distance not unlike this distance scaled down for a girl, and every weekend it had kept its rusty counsel while she grew furious, then theatrical, then quiet. "You are shooting at the applause," he said at last, in August, when her accuracy had become so bad it was nearly a performance of its own. "The applause hasn't arrived yet and you're already arguing with it. Shoot at the plate, Willa. The plate is the only one out there who hasn't got an opinion about you."
She had wept, offensively, and then, because grief and embarrassment are both solvents, she had understood. The next weekend the plate had offered up its first honest ring and Tom had not whooped. He had nodded the Hargrove nod, decades before she knew the chief's name for it, and said, "There. Now do it when somebody's watching, and we'll call it yours."
Somebody was watching now. Everybody was watching now. And the hardest part of the first shot, she discovered with the rifle steady in her hands and the result still travelling toward her across a lane of magnified light and other people's eyes, was not having fired it. It was remaining the person who had fired it for as long as the verification took — not inflating, not apologising in advance, not performing modesty for the rope as insurance against disappointment. Rose had a sentence for that too, a kitchen sentence, learned over years of feeding hundreds of children who did not know her name. *Serve it hot and stand by it.* Her mother had meant casseroles. Willa had stolen it for every important thing since she was seventeen.
Down the lane, the plate stood in its sand and kept its counsel a final few seconds longer.
At the table, the binoculars began, very slowly, to come down.
Chapter 9: Again
The first shot did not tell her anything she could use, and Willa Callen was grateful for that, in the clean and narrow way she was grateful for a door that stayed shut.