Family Dinners pt 3

No one had been paying attention to Grandma Mazur. She was still playing with the gun, aiming and sighting, getting used to the heft of it. I realized there was a box of ammo beside the tampons. A scary thought skittered into my mind.
"Grandma, you didn't load the gun, did you?"
"Well of course I loaded the gun," she said. "And I left the one hole empty like I saw on television. That way you can't shoot nothing by mistake." She cocked the gun to demonstrate the safety of her action. There was a loud bang, a flash erupted from the gun barrel, and the chicken carcass jumped on its plate.
"Holy mother of God!" my mother shrieked, leaping to her feet, knocking her chair over.
"Dang," Grandma said, "guess I left the wrong hole empty." She leaned forward to examine her handiwork.
"Not bad for my first time with a gun. I shot that sucker right in the gumpy."
My father had a white-knuckled grip on his fork, and his face was cranberry red.
I scurried around the table and carefully took the gun from Grandma Mazur. I shook out the bullets and shoveled all my stuff back into my shoulder bag.
"Look at that broken plate," my mother said. "It was part of a set. How will I ever replace it?" She moved the plate, and we all stared in silence at the neat round hole in the table cloth and the bullet embedded in the mahogany table.
Grandma Mazur was the first to speak. "That shooting gave me an appetite," she said. "Somebody pass the potatoes."
-Janet Evanovich, One For The Money