When my father taught me to shoot a gun, I learned first by watching. He strung up a paper man, which he sailed downrange on a motorized pulley. He tapped the plastic soundproof shells sitting over each of his ears, so I tapped the ones over mine. Then he began. When he was finished, I swept up the empty shells for my father to reload at home.

When my father taught me to shoot a gun, he taught me to keep my finger off the trigger right up until I meant to fire. He taught me to aim for the heart. He taught me to keep shooting, and to keep aiming as I shot.

When my father taught me to shoot a gun, he said it’s the hits that count, Cassie, and other bits from the “Rifleman’s Creed,” like that shooting a gun meant learning its parts, its accessories, its sights, and its barrel.

When my father taught me to shoot a gun, he also taught me to clean it. Then he had me time him putting it back together. I sat at the other end of the kitchen table, eyes fixed on his hands, my own hand poised at my wrist. I was impressed, but he balked at the numbers on my digital watch. My mother briefly emerged from the cavern of their bedroom, poured herself a glass of water, and shook her head. She used to time me, he said, after the door shut behind her again. I reset the timer on my watch and we started over. He was always tinkering with something, busying his hands. My mother told me he stopped smoking the day I was born and I imagine that’s why his fingers were always restless.

When my father taught me to shoot a gun, it was a family affair. His father had some land and we would shoot holes in aluminum cans. They would talk about my mother (who was sleeping all day since the doctor took her womb); my grandmother (rest her soul); and the Marine Corps (including but not limited to the many uses for MRE peanut butter packets, such as to cushion their elbows during marksman practice). If you shined a light inside one of the shot-up soda cans, entire constellations would pour out. The drive back home was mostly manure piles and dead grass and the telephone poles that I chopped down with the blade of my hand as we passed.

When my father taught me to shoot a gun, my mother was apprehensive. She’d had a brother who put a pistol in his mouth and my father said this had made her unreasonable, though he said it where she wouldn’t hear. He handed me the range receipt to throw away; instead, I filed it between Gunpowder Plot and Gupta Dynasty in an encyclopedia in my bedroom. The encyclopedias were my father’s from when he was a child, and I sometimes found notes or dollar bills tucked inside and forgotten. Once, I found a delicate daddy long-legs pressed like a flower.

When my father taught me to shoot a gun, I sneezed gunpowder for days.

When my father taught me to shoot a gun, he taped his paper man to the garage wall and scribbled the words WARNING SHOT over a hole where he had missed just shy of the skull.

When my father taught me to shoot a gun, the gun jammed and I had to set it down slowly for him to pick up and clear.

When my father taught me to shoot a gun, I made a shape like the Big Dipper scooping out the paper man’s heart.

When my father taught me to shoot a gun, we stopped for ice cream after because it was dollar scoop night and he said don’t tell your mother and I wasn’t sure about which part.

When my father taught me to shoot a gun, it was because he had no son to teach. My father taught me to shoot a gun because it was his job to teach and that was what he knew.

When my father taught me to shoot a gun, my grandfather had just died, and my father bore down on that trigger like teeth on a belt. What was inherited was less than what was owed, and, leaving my grandfather’s house for the last time, my father began to cry. My mother kissed his shoulder and took the keys from his hand, and the three of us rode silently home.

When my father died the year after that, it wasn’t sudden, but it was fast. He waited until he was jaundiced to see a doctor—his skin parchment yellow like the paper man’s—and by then it was too late.

When my father died, his first question had been whether the disease was related to his history of smoking. When they told him it wasn’t, he said, well, goddamn. He said, in that case, have you got a cigarette?

When my father died, I wrote him notes that I filed between encyclopedia pages like Cancer: 1) the dimmest of the zodiacal constellations, and 2) a disease characterized by the rampant and abnormal growth and spread of cells.

When my father died, my mother kept his shirts and sold the guns.

When my father died, they gave him a three-volley salute. It was the first time I ever flinched at the sound of gunfire. My mother said, remember when we used to go camping, even though it was just in the backyard, and I remembered an aluminum can punched with holes, constellations climbing the tent walls.

When my father died, we found his gravestone among the flush uniform rows at the national cemetery, each of them flecked with bits of bronze. Blood rushed to my trigger finger as I connected the dots into the shape of the Big Dipper. I thought to myself: This is my father. There are many here like him, but this one is mine. The grounds were immodestly green, the cemetery surrounded by desert and solar farms. I asked my mother why he hadn’t been placed closer to my grandfather and she said the space between them was how many other people they’d had to bury that year. Some distance away from us, a procession of dark figures filed up a winding path; I plucked them up one by one with my hand.

The only time that the three of us went camping for real was during a summer visiting family in Nogales—the family who would take us in after the loss of my father and his income finally upended us, after we had sold the television, the dining set, after we’d sold the encyclopedias. But, before all that, there had been s’mores and hikes and dares to touch the pipe cactus; a blur of cousins and always someone preparing food. The raging afternoon sun ducked behind evening clouds, the sky streaked with columns of rain that dried before they touched the ground.

Then, when a flash flood warning forced us to return to my uncle’s house early, we passed the people standing in line for sandbags outside of the fire station, and, as we pulled into the drive, I admired my uncle’s window shutters, which, unlike ours, had a purpose, weren’t just nailed in place. The house vibrated from both the rain outside and the bodies within. I remember my father, the fidgeter, holding a tube of silicone glue and a leaky Super Soaker, a swarm of cousins offering up their broken toys for repair. My mother, smiling, a baby cousin on her hip, surrounded by family the size they’d always hoped for. The smell of petrichor in the evening when the sky had finally stilled, the Mason jar full of fireflies that died on the bedside table, because we were so afraid to lose them that we poked no holes in the lid.