“Oh,” she says. “I think maybe I’ll just go back upstairs and see if—” I make a quick move over to the washing machine and grab the gun. I crack the barrel open.

“What are you doing?” she says. I start going through the packing crate, looking for shells to fit the gun, talking the whole time, telling her the starling story in a very level narrator-type voice. A voice like Robert Stack’s.

“So I keep watching the dumb thing. I keep my eye on him. He’s just sitting up there on the curtain rod breathing real hard, his heart thumping away. Just hanging on to the curtain for dear life. And I’ve had about two bottles of wine by now. Brunello di Montalcino. Aged in oak. Have you ever tried it?” I ask her.

“I don’t drink wine,” she says, and her face looks very grim and ashen. I finally find the green box of slim .410 shells and open it. I take one out and slip it into the open chamber, then snap the barrel shut.

“Well, I was unhappy back then, see. I was very unhappy, and drinking that stuff made me feel good. It didn’t make me feel happy, it just made me feel all right about myself. You know what I mean? Does that make sense to you?” She nods. “It felt all right to be laid up way out in the deep country all by myself with a .410 across my lap, shit-faced drunk, listening to cicadas, chain-smoking, and shooting starlings off the curtains in my bedroom until three in the morning. I never could have predicted it, that’s for sure. I never saw the situation coming. Just like this—just like this one right here.”

“What do you mean?” she says.

“This. No way to predict this. That I’d be down here in the basement showing you a gun while there’s a party going on upstairs, and talking about the past.”

“I think I’ll just go on back up and—” She gasps when I raise the gun up over her head and train it on a can of yellow tennis balls high up on the shelf behind her. She freezes and starts to tremble a little.

“I’m not going to shoot you,” I say. She giggles and makes a little spitting sound.

“Well, I hope not!” she says. “Why would you want to shoot me?”

“I don’t,” I say. “I don’t want to shoot you.”

“Isn’t this a little dangerous?”

“What?” I say, holding the .410 above her head, aimed right at the can of tennis balls.

“Pointing a loaded gun at somebody.”

“I’m not pointing it at you. I’m pointing it at that can of balls.”

“But it’s in my direction,” she says.