“Is she a nice girl?” Ryan asked.
“He. And no. He’s not. Not particularly,” he said with a grin and glint in his eye that made him look suddenly older and less naïve than he’d seemed at first. “But that’s one of the things I love about him.” He gave Ryan a dismissive once-over. “So, if you’re asking me out, thanks, but no, thanks.”
I felt more than heard my father laughing silently behind me. Ryan was pissed. I so wanted to high-five Danny right then. Knowing Ryan, this would be the last time Danny caddied at the club. He was definitely going to need a good job. I made a mental note to tip him double and make sure he had my contact information.
The rest of the tournament passed uneventfully. I Paid-a-Pro to make a shot for me and landed just outside the hole, closest I’d ever come to a hole in one. My father won a hat that held two cans of beer for hitting a stale marshmallow a surprising distance.
The only fly in the ointment was the constant feeling I had of being watched. I’d get that itch between my shoulder blades and casually look around to see who it could be. I never caught anybody, but out of the corner of my eye, I kept seeing that guy from team yellow polo. Of course, that could have been because they were right behind us in the order. But I couldn’t stop looking at him. Something about his mouth and jawline tugged at my memory. I watched him tee off, his mouth twisting as his body twisted. He stayed frozen until the ball landed, his right foot almost over his left, his balance off-center.
Damn it, I knew that stroke. I grunted in frustration.
“Something wrong?” Danny asked.
I shook my head, irritated. “No. I just…that guy looks familiar but I can’t place him. It’s like it’s right on the tip of my tongue. Do you know him?” I asked Ryan and my dad.
“Doesn’t look familiar,” my father said.
“He’s nothing special,” Ryan said quietly as Symanski teed off, “but did you see the tall brunet guy he’s playing with? He’s hot. Like supermodel hot. Wonder if he’s single.”
“I seriously doubt it,” I said.
Danny turned to look at the group. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “I kind of like the older guy with the salt-and-pepper hair. He’s got that whole silver fox/daddy vibe.” There was a beat and Danny snorted a laugh. He was looking off into the distance and I had to tug on his arm to get his attention. “Sorry,” he said, turning his attention to the last hole. “What do we have here?”
After the tournament, there were endless awards and silent auctions and speeches. We’d played great and raised a nice sum for the Special Olympics. Symanski had gone, said he had business to do but would be in touch. Ryan seemed thrilled. I was less so. Seemed like a lot of speculation and ifs. Nothing to get too excited about.
A flash of yellow caught my eye. It was that damn guy again. But now he had his hat and glasses off. Without them, everything was much clearer. I knew that face.
That guy looked a hell of a lot like Jake Karlsson. I hadn’t seen Jake in fifteen years but once upon a time, I’d known him intimately, studied his face for hours. Damn, this guy looked like him. I had to know. “Jake?” I called. “Jake Karlsson?”
Danny looked to see who I was talking about. His eyes widened when he saw the man and he coughed loudly.
The man I was almost one hundred percent sure was Jake whipped his head around, stared me right in the eye, and then moved quickly out the side of the tent.
That had been him. It definitely had been.
“I’ll meet you at the car,” I told Ryan. I sidestepped Danny who had suddenly moved in front of me and slipped out of the tent before anyone could say anything.
I lost him within the first thirty seconds. Where the hell could he have gone?
Damn, he was one slippery bastard. Of course, I’d known that already. He’d slipped from my life and disappeared in a way I hadn’t thought possible in this electronic age. As embarrassing as it was to admit, I’d had a PI look for him about three years ago when things were starting to look bad for me.
I don’t know why I’d done it. We knew he was alive. Momo got cards every Christmas and Mother’s Day and her birthday. Sammy was lucky, he got phone calls. If he’d wanted to talk to me, he easily could have. Obviously, he hadn’t.
But for some damn reason, I’d still wanted to talk to him. To yell at him. To have him yell at me. For him to tell me how amazing my future was going to be, no matter how bad it looked right then.
That was something Jake had always done for me, ever since we were kids. Jake’s imagination was boundless. He could see whole worlds where others only saw walls. Whenever our moms were visiting, we would sneak out and find someplace private and Jake would tell me stories.
Those stories had saved me when we were twelve and my mom had gotten sick the first time. When I hadn’t been able to talk about it, couldn’t even find the words to say how I felt, Jake spoke for me. He had the words.
He didn’t tell me everything was going to be all right, because even at that tender age, we both knew that was a promise no one could make. What Jake gave me was a future. He painted a picture of a life of tomorrows. He told me about the places we would visit—Rome and Paris and Disney World—the things we would do—win the Stanley Cup, hike the Appalachian Trail—as if they were absolutes, as if he were a visitor from the future recounting things we’d already experienced.
And I’d believed them. I needed to. They painted a picture beyond the pain and fear and banality of my day-to-day existence.
Then, three years later, my mother’s cancer came back. We got the news in May. Four weeks later, she’d moved into hospice. School had just ended when she died.
The bottom fell out of my world and Jake saved me again. That time, when neither of us could find words for this all-encompassing loss, he spoke to me in the new language of the body we had only tentatively begun to learn.
For better or worse, those first innocent and not-so-innocent explorations of feelings and desires we’d only sensed the edges of in our younger years would forever be intertwined with my experience of my mother dying.
We had been sixteen. It was the summer between tenth and eleventh grade, we had no responsibilities, and we’d been left completely and totally alone.
My father was lost to his grief, consumed with his dying wife.
Jake’s mom, ever the caretaker, had set aside her grief at the loss of her best friend since childhood to deal with three lost boys and one lost man. She’d had to explain over and over again to a devastated thirteen-year-old Sammy why his aunt Bitty wasn’t going to be around anymore. She managed the army of women and extended family keeping us all fed and clothed.
She sat with my mother for hours going over the details of things my father couldn’t face. Things like her will and memorial service, writing out Christmas and birthday cards for me for the next decade. (Oh, how I’d cried that first Christmas, almost as hard as I’d cried the first Christmas without a card.)
She’d transcribed long, tear-splattered letters from my mother to each of us about how proud she was of us, the people we were, and the people we would become. How much she loved us and how grateful she was to have been allowed to spend the time she’d be granted with us, and how she was so glad that we would always have each other to lean on when life got to be too much.