He was ten when he took the gun. He lifted it with both hands. It was heavier than it looked, yet lighter than he had expected. The light from a bare bulb made the barrel glint like an angry animal's eye.

It wasn't exactly curiosity. His father had shown it to the children last summer. He had let them touch the cool metal and the black leather grip. Josie had wrinkled her nose; their father had laughed and explained that it was there to keep them safe. He'd shown how the cylinder opened, revealing six deep, hollow chambers. He'd cocked the hammer back with his thumb and demonstrated how, when he pressed the trigger, the hammer twitched slowly--slowly--forward.

Then he'd put it back in the cabinet under the workbench, beside the big bottle of Laphroaig. "Now you know how it works," he'd said. "So leave it alone."

He had said this in his warning voice, his eyes trained hard on the children. The girls had bent their blonde heads close, and Beth had popped her thumb into her mouth. It was nearly as bad as the voice he used to fight with their mother at night, long past bedtime but just before sleep. It scared all of them.

On the day Leo took the gun, his sisters were playing an elaborate game of House, and so he went alone to play in the garage. He boosted himself up to sit on the workbench. The gun looked like he remembered, all rounded lines and gray gleam. It took him a moment to remember how to release the cylinder. Then he touched the lever properly, and it opened into his palm easy as cracking an egg.

Then he did something startling, acting on instinct he didn't know he had.

He set the gun aside, hopped down and knelt in front of the cabinet. From a small cardboard box, he shook out a single slender bullet. This, too, was heavier than it looked. He turned it in shaking fingers, fit his thumbnail into its narrow groove. It didn't blow him up. So he stood, loaded the bullet into a chamber, clapped the cylinder shut. His hands warmed the metal and left faint fingerprint smears. He inspected the marks, polished them away with the hem of his T-shirt. He held the gun by the leather grip, peered down the sight and waited.

He did not know why he waited, nor how long, before his mother called him.

Leo replaced the gun as carefully as Father Whelan setting the Communion cup on the altar. It was dinnertime, and his father wasn't home yet. His mother would be anxious, watching the door while she filled plates. It was better when his father came home early. They all knew that; they all loved him.

As he went inside, he grew tired of thinking about the gun. It could not move from where he'd left it, behind the closed cabinet door, where it was kept safe.