“No, we could go down there, I guess. I can see if I could dig them out.”

“You could? That would be fantastic!” We head down to the basement, weaving through the kitchen, now packed with teenage girls, friends of my daughter; polka-dot bandannas and Birkenstocks— very athletic, sunburned, take-no-shit-from-men type of girls. My daughter gives me a loving pat on the head as we go by. It reminds me I’m a father and at the same time makes me feel slightly childlike.

It’s been five years since I even looked at the tall shipping crate where the shotguns and rifles are packed away. I stopped hunting after we moved here, mainly because in the Midwest it’s illegal to hunt deer with a rifle and I find the idea of maiming one with a shotgun slug and having him drag off into the woods and slowly bleed to death the height of idiocy. I spot the crate in a dark, moldy corner behind the boiler and rummage around through the long, heavy barrels wrapped in padded butcher paper and sealed up with masking tape. The woman from Montana is right behind me, breathing heavily. “You can tell just by the feel of them which one is which?” she asks me.

“Yes, well, the .410 has a very skinny barrel, almost like a .22. Very light. Skinnier than a 20-gauge,” I tell her.

“So you know every gun in there just by the feel of the barrel? That’s incredible!” she says.

“Not really,” I say. “Like, for instance, this one here—I know this is a .270 by the scope. See?” She reaches out and gingerly touches the bulge under the paper.

“Oh,” she says. “I see. So the .410 doesn’t have a scope, then? Is that the idea?”

“Right. The .410’s a shotgun. A small shotgun. This is a rifle.”

“Oh, so there’s a difference between a shotgun and a rifle?” she says.

It suddenly feels like I’ve been duped. Upstairs the party is going full tilt and the kids have cranked up Moby on the speakers and there’s a sudden thunderous cacophony of voices all speaking simultaneously and shrieking to be heard over the swelling music and something is so funny that it sounds as though somebody had just held up a cue card. What am I doing down here? Finally, I find the skinny .410 and strip the paper off it and hoist it out of the packing crate.

“Oh, it looks just like a toy gun!” she says, and backs away while I crack the slim barrel and make sure it’s empty. “Can I hold it?” she says.