Her father’s daughter
There are 25 to 50 soldiers in a platoon, and there are three to seven platoons in a company. In the army, my dad was the best shot in his company. Now he shoots squirrels in our backyard with a .22-caliber pellet rifle.
At first, my mom agreed with me, that we shouldn’t kill other living creatures just for sport. But then the squirrels started tearing up her flowers, and that changed her opinion.
Today, my sister got home from school while my mom and I were baking oatmeal-raisin cookies. We saw her car pull into the driveway and we heard the garage door open, but she didn’t come up the stairs. Pulling a tray out of the oven, my mom asked, “What’s she doing?”
I walked over and looked through the glass door to the backyard and saw a sixteen-year-old girl with pigtails, still wearing her school uniform (plaid skirt, burgundy polo), carrying a dead squirrel on a shovel to its unceremonious funeral—a toss over the fence.
I told my mom what she was doing. Mom said, “Well, she is her father’s daughter.” When my sister came into the house and up the stairs, I asked her, “How many did you get?” She said, “Two. I hit another one, but he kept running.”