Page 18 - Demo

Win the Game (continued from preceding page)
“I haven’t seen him all week, Bails. I want to help.”
Bright mornings gave Pine Valley Country Club a hopeful air, as if sunshine and warmth would help you avoid hitting your ball into ponds. On the tenth tee, just beside them, Kelly observed a foursome
“All right,” she said, frowning. “You get the milk, and I’ll change him.”
of paunchy, red-cheeked men hit their first shots. Two balls went into the trees, another into a sand trap, and one bounced furiously along the fairway and stopped about 100 yards away. Yet the men cheered after each drive; they puffed on cigars and raised their cans of beer high. They spit and hooted and made rude sounds in the middle of each other’s swings. To Kelly, they were like animals released from a cage but today, strangely, he found himself reveling in their apparent freedom. He took out a new sleeve of balls and tossed them to Gil.
But he’d picked up his phone while the milk was in the water bath—it was a new farming sim that he liked—and the milk boiled. He was frantically cool- ing it under the tap when Bailey came down with the baby screeching in her arms, waving a rather large diaper in front of her.
“I texted you the size, Kelly. Is it that hard?”
What else could have happened? They were both tired—tired of each other, maybe, or just tired of the whole modern life mess-up. He asked her if she would have preferred Arnie as a husband. She answered that anyone who left her alone would be better, and then she raised her hand, index finger rigid, and pointed.
Tall, wiry and tanned, Gil sported a long, black beard and shades that he wore winter and summer. The three things he liked most were golf, drinking light beer, and chain-smoking, preferably all at the same time. He was club champion three years in a row, but no one envied him or looked at him side- ways. They wanted him to win, no matter what, and each year cheered him more loudly than before. He was that kind of guy. A guy’s guy, Bailey had called him once in a voice that sounded suspiciously like admiration, and Kelly had felt quite suddenly that he should take up weight-lifting. But Gil was kind, for all that, and Kelly didn’t begrudge his space in the alpha’s social orbit.
“I know, I know, I know,” he said, and padded softly
downstairs to the couch.
~
In the garage, Kelly pulled his gym bag out of the car: he was trying to work out the issue of leaving and flipflopped between racing upstairs to grab some essentials, such as underwear, or just heading to the nearest big-box. Bailey was a notoriously light sleep- er. Then he lit upon his golf clubs in the corner.
Four girls in their twenties, identically dressed in short skirts and tight-fitting tops, all made up to a magazine-cover sheen, filed briskly out of the club- house. Each slid into a cooler-cart and motored off in a high-pitched buzz. Saturdays were half-price beer and the men started drinking early. It didn’t help the golf, and the trash cans would be overflowing with empties by early afternoon, but beer or not, stellar play was reserved for a talented few. All the girls knew Gil by name.
Maybe, he thought. He didn’t have to leave today. Per- haps a quick round with Gil first.
Kelly slowly tapped out a message to the man, avoid- ing any hint of drama, any stray adjective that could betray his situation.
“Golf today?”
The response was practically immediate.
“Teeing off at 8. Get your ass out here, handsome.”
Gil bought six cans of lite beer from a girl named Tanya, and told her to look for them again on the fourth hole. He tossed a beer to Kelly, telling him to drink up, but Kelly was more interested in the men exiting the clubhouse. As had happened with the foursome on the tenth tee, he found their bragging and heckling and loud demeanor—behavior which usually bothered him—somehow liberating. They would arrange their clubs conveniently in the bag; they would buy sleeves of balls and new gloves and maybe another box of tees. They would silence their phones and replace them with range finders. After the round—five or six hours, depending—Kelly knew
He opened the car door, raised his head as of he were listening to a far-off radio, then closed it and scuttled
to the kitchen.
The stickie on the fridge read: “Golfing with Gil. Back
tonight.”
~
“Hey, Kelly. Pass me some goddamned golf balls, will you?”
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