afternoons.”
“Let’s go for the evenings, if you think you’ll get enough sign-ups.”
“Oh, there’s no doubt of that,” Ken said drily.
“Okay.” He hesitated. “First on the list is Jake Vennetti.”
“The cop’s son.”
“Yeah. You remember?”
“Hard to forget.”
“Thanks, Ken. I appreciate this.”
“I appreciate you volunteering. I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have teaching here.” He chuckled. “Even if you don’t hunt.”
Ethan decided he could wait to talk to Laura, and got out to start door-belling.
Nobody had seen a damn thing. Or they weren’t home today, just like they hadn’t been home the past three times he rang their doorbell.
Not until he took a break for lunch did he call her.
She was breathing hard when she answered.
“Did I catch you on the run?” he asked.
“No, I’m scraping paint from my back deck. It’s an awful job. I was going to just paint it, but it was lumpy with a bunch of previous coats, so... One of the joys of home ownership.”
“I live in an apartment.” He didn’t even know why he said that. He and Erin had bought a house but split up barely a year later and sold the place.
Laura huffed. “Right this minute, that’s sounding good.”
She made him smile more than he could remember in a while, a surprise considering how mad and/or upset she’d been during most of their interactions.
“The next youth hunter safety class with any openings starts Tuesday night. Two hours a session, four consecutive Tuesdays. I hope Jake doesn’t have a conflict.”
“No, but...hunter?”
“That’s what’s taught to kids his age. We get all the basics in.” He hesitated. “With your permission, I thought I’d spend a little time at the range with him myself, working with handguns.”
“You’re not teaching the class?” She sounded worried.
“I am.” No way he was admitting he’d set the whole thing up for Jake’s sake.
She expelled an “Oh!” that sounded relieved. “What time on Tuesday and where?”
He told her, and she promised to call to officially sign Jake up and pay the minimal fee.
“Can I offer you dinner Tuesday before the class?”
He wasn’t fooled by how elaborately casual she sounded. Some anxiety vibrated in her voice. He couldn’t help wondering. Did she want reassurance about Jake, about letting him handle guns? Or...was she asking because she wanted to see him, and feared it had never crossed his mind to make their relationship personal?
Man, he hoped the answer was number two.
“I’d appreciate that,” he said. “That way Jake can go with me, unless you want to come along and watch.”
The tiny pool of silence didn’t surprise him.
“He’d probably rather I didn’t come.”
“He’s a boy,” Ethan said gently.
“I didn’t even have a brother. Raising a boy is...challenging.”
“If it’s any consolation, my mother says my sister gave her more heartburn than I did.”
“That’s not what you said earlier.” Her voice was teasing.
“Oh, I was a pain in the ass, but Carla was a mass of screaming hormones for at least two years. Even I was scared of her.”
Laura was giggling when they signed off, Ethan smiling in satisfaction.
* * *
“NUMBER ONE IS the golden rule of gun safety. Anyone already know this?”
A girl who looked to be fourteen or fifteen raised her hand. “Never point your gun at anything you don’t want to shoot.”
Ethan nodded. “That’s one way to put it. When you’re handling a gun of any kind, point it in a safe direction. Not at a person, not at your dog, not at your mom’s favorite lamp.” He looked from one face to the next. “Safest place is at the ground, but not too close to your feet.” Holding the unloaded .22 rifle, he demonstrated.
The kids were rapt, even though safety rules were pretty basic. Never touch the trigger until you’re ready to shoot. Keep the gun unloaded until you’re ready to use it. Check to see if the gun is loaded every time you pick it up. Don’t rely on a gun’s safety catch. Never try to take a gun away from someone by grabbing the barrel.
Never fool around with a gun. No Cowboys and Indians, Cops and Robbers games.
Ethan didn’t look directly at Jake when he said that one, but with his peripheral vision he saw him duck his head.
Ethan talked about some other dangers and rules, emphasizing that anyone handling a gun had to be aware not only of their target, but of what was surrounding that target and behind it.
“You might be accurate on the range, but shooting a deer on the run or a duck taking off from a pond is another story. You’re tracking the movement, getting excited. What if there’s another hunter on the other side of the pond? What if you’re shooting tin cans off the fence at your uncle’s farm and you didn’t notice a horse wandering in the pasture behind that fence?”
He had them do some role-playing, let them handle several rifles he’d borrowed from Ken for the purpose, after elaborately checking to be sure they were unloaded even though he had, of course, done so before starting the class.
This first class, they talked about gun care, too. About trigger locks and gun safes. He paired them up and had each pair clean a .22 rifle, in part to help them understand what each part did, but also because a clean gun was a safer gun.
They all worked earnestly, although he could tell that, for about half the kids, he wasn’t saying anything they didn’t know and that they were already pretty comfortable handling the .22s. He appreciated their parents putting them through a class anyway.
He promised to give them a little time the next week on the range, and told them he was trying to book an extra hour at an outdoor range that would give them a different experience.
When the two hours were up, he spent another twenty minutes talking to parents. While he waited, Jake stared into the glass-fronted cabinets at handguns for sale.
Ken had hung around tonight, and he talked easily to Jake while Ethan was busy.
“See you next week,” he said when they left, as if he hadn’t noticed anything amiss about Jake’s interest.
On the drive home, Jake grumbled about not having been able to shoot tonight, but he also asked some eager questions and talked about the other kids in the class.
“I didn’t think there’d be girls. And one of them, Amber, says she already knows all this stuff. Her dad takes her target shooting all the time, and she says her mom hunts, too.”
“There are quite a few women who compete all the way up to an international level in target shooting, too.”
“Girls don’t usually talk about guns.”
Ethan laughed. “Better not say girls in quite that tone around your mom. And if you lived in a more rural part of the state, I think you’d find more girls interested. For men and women, hunting is a less common interest among an urban population.”
“How come you don’t hunt?”
“I take