Grant cleared his throat. It was a small sound, amplified by nothing, and yet it travelled because the people nearest the table were listening for any sign that the ceremony would move. He lifted his clipboard a fraction. He glanced at Danny, then at Willa, then at the rifle, and something in his expression suggested that he regretted allowing the inspection to become a performance and would not allow the performance to borrow any more of his morning.
"Mercer," he said.
It was not a rebuke, not in so many words. Grant was a careful man with public language. But the single name, spoken in the tone of a man reading from a list rather than applauding from a crowd, recalled Danny to the order of the day. Danny felt it. His smile altered, not disappearing, but changing its job, from entertainment to acknowledgment. He stepped half a pace toward Willa. The sun moved with him, no longer directly behind his head, and suddenly he was not a silhouette with a halo but a young man of twenty-seven with sweat at his hairline, a fine line of dust on his upper lip, and eyes that were a very ordinary blue when a person stood close enough to see them.
"You sure about standing with iron and wood?" he asked, more quietly this time, in the voice he used when cameras were not the first thing on his mind. "My rig is on the rack. Grant has cleared it before. You could borrow the setup. It would give you half a chance at the plate."
It was, she understood at once, a real offer. That made it harder, not easier. Danny was capable of kindness in the same clumsy register as his condescension, and often the two arrived wearing the same clothes. He believed the offer was practical. He believed a newer rifle, with its adjustable cheek piece and its scope like a small telescope and its trigger tuned by a man in another state who charged by the hour, would translate a shooter into a better one by an act of simple arithmetic. Many people at the range believed the same. It was a comforting doctrine, because it turned excellence into something that could be purchased in instalments, and turned failure into an equipment list that could be corrected next season. Willa had heard versions of it since she first outgrew the junior rifles. Get her a proper gun. Get her a coach. Get her out of that old shirt. As if the person holding the thing were the least important component in the arrangement.
"No," she said. "Thank you."
"Because it was his?"
The question surprised them both. Danny had not intended to ask anything personal. Personal questions were not his sport. But the rifle had carried the question into his hands with its warm wood and its worn place, and it had asked itself through him. For an instant the performance slipped, and behind it stood a younger and less certain man who had grown up being handed better and better equipment by a father who coached by upgrading, and who did not know what people did with objects that could not be improved because they were not, in the end, objects at all.
Willa looked at the rifle. She could see, where Danny's thumb rested, the slight shine on the stock her father's thumb had made. She could see the scope she had cleaned at the kitchen table the night before while her mother slept in the next room after a double shift. She could see the whole plain truth of it, which was too large to hand to Danny Mercer in front of two hundred phones.
"Because it is mine," she said.
A murmur went along the rope, not loud, not hostile, but with edges. It is mine. People turned the sentence over. A girl in a pink visor whispered it to her friend with a small laugh that might have been admiration and might have been imitation. A man in a union cap, who had known Tom Callen for thirty years and had attended the funeral with a casserole dish his wife had made, felt the words land somewhere behind his ribs and looked down at his boots. Somewhere at the back a child asked, in the carrying voice children use when adults have agreed not to hear them, whose gun it was anyway, and was hushed by three people at once.
Grant wrote something on his clipboard. Nobody saw what. He had a habit of writing at moments when other people filled silence with opinion, and the habit lent his notes an accidental air of judgment. In fact he had written only the time, because the book required a time for a change of possession, and a piece of range equipment returning to its registered shooter was a change of possession even when half the county was filming it. Twenty past eleven. Final continuing. Rifle returned. He wrote the words in block capitals, unhurried, letting the letters be exactly as tall as one another. Then he added the shooter's number, because the book required that too. He did not add, though he thought it, that Mercer should have handed the thing back five minutes earlier.
Chief Walter Hargrove arrived at the side of the officials' table during that pause, without hurry and without announcement, a man in his seventies in a black jacket with a blue-and-gold range patch, a cap pulled straight, and large black binoculars hanging on a strap against his chest like a second, heavier heart. He took in the board, the line, the two young people and the rifle between them, and his face arranged itself into the neutrality of a man who has decided in advance that a final is a final and sentiment is a poor substitute for a score. He had coached at national level when Danny's father was still boasting in schoolyards. He had watched, by his own later estimate, something over a thousand targets receive something over ten thousand shots, and he was privately certain that the sport had shown him everything it contained. He nodded to Grant. Grant nodded back. Neither man said Willa's name, because her name was next on the list, and there was a dignity, Grant believed, in letting a list arrive at a person in its own proper order.