“You’re up early,” she said, watching him.

“The sun.” He put out his empty hand.

She walked over and kissed him, sitting down.

“Dad.”

“Huh?”

“Do you remember the Winchester pump rifle I used to shoot with when I was little?”

“Did you ever shoot it?”

She put her lips close to his ear and spoke in a low voice. “I’d like to have it. Where did you put it?”

Her father took a long swallow of the cold milk and squinted down the street, which was flowing with yellow dawn light filtered through the bare hackberry branches. “My brother gave it to me when I was a young man. I never used it, but he told me to keep it oiled. It was a nice gun.”

“Where is the rifle?” she murmured.

He looked across the street and his mouth briefly became an O. “I killed a mad dog with it right over there after the ’47 hurricane. I hated to do it. Took three shots.”

She put an arm on his shoulder. “Do you think we could find it?”

“It’s not lost. I know just where it is.”

She looked down. Perhaps he did. “Where’s that?”

“The winter place.”

“What?”

His head turned, not a willed action, but a malfunction. “Send Mama out when you go to the kitchen.” He pushed her hands away and leaned his cheek against the swing chains.

When she walked into the creaking upstairs hall, she could see her mother everywhere. She expected her to walk around every corner, through every door, pacing the routes of her children’s lives. The upstairs wainscoting and ceiling were made of beaded board painted an old glossy cream color nobody had used in decades. Her grandfather had painted the upstairs with it in the forties. The floor was darkened pine and it cracked like a spine as she walked into her father’s office, a little room where his books and records gathered dust. On his desk was a photograph of her mother, and she reached out, her hands balking before the glass. Next to the desk was a narrow door leading under the eaves, a storage place for quilts—the winter place, named by her own baby talk. She pulled on the porcelain knob and reached into the dark space to the right. Her palm closed on the sharp angles of the rifle’s octagonal barrel, and she pulled it into the light. It was still gleaming and rustless, its barrel and magazine tube retaining all the original factory blue, the receiver and hammer showing the fiery yellow, red, and azure swirls of case-hardened color. She slid the walnut forearm down, listening to the pop and sing of well-tempered springs, the glide of hand-fitted steel. Putting her thumb on the hammer, she lowered it, going downstairs with the gun in the crook of her arm to call Aunt Nellie.