Relentless

acid-indigestion from my poblano-chile omelet, and I knew I would not sleep in the glare of daylight. Nevertheless, I told Penny, “When the highway comes back toward the coast, up where it gets lonely, wake me. We’ll find an isolated spot, you can give me gun instruction.”
    Perhaps half a mile farther, I fell asleep.
    When Penny woke me two and a half hours later, we were no longer on U.S. Highway 101. We followed a rutted, weedy dirt road with the sun at our back. Still stiff and dry from the heat of summer, the weeds bristled in front of us and lay broken in our wake. No one else had come this way since at least the previous spring.
    The road descended through a pine woods to the coast. Waves broke onto a short slope of pearly sand. The sand feathered into a wide expanse of shingle: a deep bed of small waterworn stones and pebbles smoothed by centuries of tidal action.
    Penny parked on the shingle, at a place where it was backstopped by a bluff.
    When she switched off the engine, I said, “If you’re worried that a gun is too complex a machine for me, that I’ll shoot off my nose, I want you to know this is different now. I can do this.”
    “A shot-off nose, I can handle. Let’s just not have anything like the vacuum-cleaner incident.”
    “I’m serious, Penny. I can do this.”
    She put a hand against my cheek. “I know you can, sweetie. You can do anything.”

    I didn’t realize that before I learned to shoot, I had to learn how to stand, which involved not just the feet but the entire body through the arms to the position of the hands on the gun. Penny favored the Weaver stance for some situations, the Isosceles stance for others. All this was easier than learning how to waltz, but harder than I expected.
    Milo and Lassie remained in the Mountaineer. I’m sure that Milo continued to be sufficiently engrossed in weird science that he paid no attention to the spectacle that I made of myself. But every time I glanced at the SUV, the dog was watching and appeared to be laughing.
    The metal cases we brought from Boom World contained shoulder rigs for carrying our guns under jackets, spare magazines, ammo, and the same .45-caliber pistol for each of us: a Springfield Armory Super Tuned Champion, which is a customized stainless-steel version of the Colt Commander.
    On this lonely part of the coast, the nearest house must have been at least five miles away. A light offshore wind would blow some of the sound of the gunfire to the sea.
    The first twenty or thirty times that I squeezed the trigger, the pleadings and the screams of victims came back to me from that far September and seemed as real as the crack of the pistol and the crash of the surf breaking behind us.
    At that time of year, the northern coast was cool, yet soon I stood sheathed in sweat. The mind is a trickster with an infinite repertoire,and mine transformed the odor of gunfire into Tray’s sour breath precisely as it had been that long-ago September night.
    Learning, I fired a hundred rounds of Federal Hydra-Shok .45 ACPs, and I would have needed five hundred if my instructor had not been so capable and so patient. At the end of the session, I was not a marksman by any standard, but I understood recoil and how to manage it. If events required close-range self-defense, I might not make a complete dead fool of myself.
    We had used large-leafed plants on the bluff face as targets. Some marked for shredding were unscathed, although a satisfying percentage were now cole slaw.
    As Penny showed me how to clean the gun, we sat together on a large rock where the shingle met the beach.
    The time had come, and so I steeled myself and said, “You know I never lie to you.”
    “It goes both ways.”
    “I deceived you by omission when I told you I was taking Milo to Roxie’s for lunch but failed to mention Waxx would be there.”
    “I made note of it in my little book of your crimes.”
    “I didn’t know you kept a diary of my crimes.”
    “It’s titled
His Transgressions and How He Will Pay.”
    “Sounds kind of medieval.”
    “What can I say. I’m a very fourteenth-century girl.”
    The offshore breeze and the sun did not disarrange and parch her hair, but groomed it into greater beauty, as if Nature considered her its special child.
    “Well,” I said, “I hope you have some pages left in that diary.”
    “Another deception by omission or a flat-out lie?”
    “The former. It goes all the way back to when we were dating. It’s