A short story by Aaron Burch

The groom-to-be was gone by the time the rest of us woke up. We made fun of him and blamed his soon-to-be-wife, because none of us had yet met her and also because we were all married or divorced and felt like that gave us the right. I don’t know what we would have talked about without his gift of the conversation starter of wondering when he might have left and why. We had nothing else in common. We were a solar system of middle-aged men with our own lives as the suns we rotated around, no relation to one another aside from the common groom-to-be in the center of the Venn diagram of our orbits.

Brian made breakfast and then left to catch a train; Kevin and Tommy both lived in town and so weren’t on a specific timetable, but left after eating; Adam slept through it all. He had a baby at home and kept telling everyone how excited he was to be able to sleep in, undisturbed. Which left me and Summer.

“I fucked up,” Summer kept saying all morning, like he’d actually fucked something up and not just bought a ticket home that didn’t leave until the evening, so much later than everyone else.

“I can hang out,” I told him.

I’d recently realized my own objectness—when in motion, I stayed in motion; at rest, I stayed at rest. I’d made the midyear resolution to be the force to more often push myself out of rest, saying yes to opportunities presented, doing anything outside the more comfortable but growing monotony of whatever my life had become.

“You sure?” Summer asked, like he was putting me out instead of saving me.

“It’s only a couple hours’ drive,” I said. “I don’t have anything to rush back for.” The drive was actually closer to four, and I’d told Carrie I would be back for some work event that she wanted me to go to with her, mostly just so she wouldn’t have to go alone, but whatever. I wasn’t avoiding home, but wasn’t not avoiding home either.

“You don’t have to,” Summer assured. “I used to live here.” I had a vague memory of him having talked about that the night before. “I know my way around. Figured I’d just wander around, visit old haunts. Man, I used to have some fun in this town!”

I fidgeted with my napkin, folding the crumbs into itself rather than just crumpling it all up into a ball.

“A little nostalgia tour,” he said. “You know?”

I did. I’d never heard the phrase before—nostalgia tour—but I knew what he meant. I’d been on a few myself.

“Sure, sure,” I said. “That sounds great. It would be fun to see the city some. It seems cool. I’ve never spent any time here.”

“You’ve never been?”

“Not really. Driven through.”

“Right. That doesn’t count. I’ll show you around!” He smiled. I could tell he was excited. I wondered what I might be getting myself into.

“I’ll be tour guide! You have your car, right?”

“Yep.”

“You mind driving me around all day?”

“Nope.”

“Perfect,” Summer said. It was decided. “This is going to be great.”

“Do you think we should wake up Adam? See if he wants to go? Or at least check on him?”

“Nah, let’s let him sleep,” Summer said. “He’s sleeping the best sleep of his life right now.”

I wondered if that was true. I knew Summer didn’t really know one way or the other, but I admired the confidence of the declaration.

“That’s where I went to high school.”

I looked to my left, where Summer was pointing out my window, his arm across my body like a mother’s in front of her child when stopping too fast. He had these tattoos up and down his arm that looked to me like random lines and shapes, some kind of abstract modern art I wasn’t sure if I didn’t get or if not getting it was part of the point. I wanted to ask him about it but was afraid to announce my possible naiveté. I was afraid, too, we’d had the conversation the night before and I’d already forgotten.

“Did you like high school?” he asked, and I wondered if this whole thing was a mistake. I didn’t give a shit where this guy I’d only met the evening before had gone to high school.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It was… fine?” I’d found my middling answers were often received as a copout, evading being decisive in any direction, but what else was there to say? It was fine.

“Same, same,” Summer said.

Our shared groom-to-be friend, a shared middle ground of neither having hated high school nor mourning it as having been our glory days. I wondered how much else we might have in common.

“It’s weird how exciting it is seeing it now though?” He said it like a question, but I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to answer. It wasn’t my high school. Was seeing his high school supposed to be exciting for me?

I looked over and Summer was staring straight forward, out the windshield, as his high school floated away behind us, staying in place while we pushed forward into our futures.

“Turn up here,” Summer said, back in the present.

“At the light?”

“Right before it, actually. Slow down a little. It’s a weird turn, there’s a small road that is kinda hard to see until you’re right up on—”

I saw it just as he was saying I would, just as I was already driving past it.

“It’s ok,” he said. “There’s a place to turn around right up here. It’s a weird turn. Most people miss it. I think it’s one of the reasons why almost no one is ever at this place.”

“Do you have a favorite bird?”

A question so simple and straightforward I’d never before considered it.

“Not really?” I said. I’d just parked where Summer had directed me to, turned my car off, was in the middle of getting out for our first stop. “Carrie loves…” I thought about it. “All birds of prey?” I wasn’t sure if she had a favorite or not. I’d never asked.

“That makes sense,” Summer said.

I looked at Summer, trying to decipher what I might have said the night before. I realized he was waiting for me, being patient. I’d only recently learned how often questions are asked because the asker really wants to answer it themselves.

“What about you?” I asked.

Summer smiled big. “I don’t know about favorite of all time,” he said. “But here, I love the American Kestrel. The owls are cool, the bald eagle is iconic, of course. I think that’s why I love the kestrel so much. You’ll see. He’s awesome.”

The paved trail split and Summer went left. I wanted to ask what the building was that the trail to the right seemed to lead to, why we weren’t going toward it, but I hated asking questions that some part of me felt like I should know the answers to.

Our trail led off into nothing, until suddenly there was something. Just like that. Six, eight, a dozen somethings—big wooden crates standing on legs so they were eye level, like a small village of oversized Little Free Libraries.

“Isn’t this great?” Summer asked.

I still wasn’t sure what this was. Then I turned a corner, and on the other side of one of the wooden crates was a metal screen, and on the other side of the metal screen was a giant bald eagle. Or maybe just a normal sized bald eagle. I wasn’t sure how big they were supposed to be; I’d never been so close to one. It was looking right at me. Were the screen not there, I could have reached out and touched its wing, if it had done the same toward me.

“I used to come here all the time,” Summer said. “I really liked coming at night. Supposedly it closes at… five or eight or maybe sundown. I don’t know. There’s no gates or anything though.” Summer spread his arms out to his sides and swiveled his body, like maybe I wouldn’t have believed him had he not presented the evidence. “I’d come after dark and get high and just watch the birds. Sometimes I’d talk to them, tell them about my day or just talk high bullshit at them. I don’t really know why. I can’t explain it.”

Carrie and I used to go to this small petting farm outside of town. Carrie didn’t want kids but loved doing the kinds of things you do with kids—zoos, science museums, swinging on swings at playgrounds. She especially loved going to the petting farm when she was stressed about something. I didn’t really get it, but it calmed her, and then after we’d been a few times, I started to get it after all. I liked the goats. There was just something about them. After a while, sometimes I would go by myself. Pet the goats, let them butt their heads into my hand. I never told Carrie. She’d probably ask why I hadn’t taken her with me, or accuse me of stealing her thing. It never felt worth the fight.

“Oh!” Summer startled me. “What happened to that vape from last night?”

“I took it. I guess no one else wanted it,” I started to explain. “It was still on the table this morning after everyone—”

Summer clapped, one big single clap. I wasn’t sure if in excitement or to cut me off or if it was directed at the birds or what.

“Perfect!” Summer said. “There’s these trails back up there—” I waited for Summer to point or nod his head or give some indication of where there was, but none came. “What do you say we get a little high, go on a little hike?”

I said that sounded like a plan.

I opened up my trunk and, behind me and over my shoulder, Summer exclaimed again.

“You golf?!”

I wondered if it was this day specifically or if this was always how he experienced the world. Ready with enthusiasm at whatever surprise came next.

“Well…” I said. “Not really. I just bought these.” They were ten, twenty, thirty years old. I had no idea how to place golf clubs in time. I’d bought them a couple months before at a garage sale because they were cheap and some part of me had always thought I might one day take up the sport. I was embarrassed by them, how cheap and old they were, and embarrassed too that I hadn’t yet gone out with them.

“They’re perfect.” Summer said. What might a life look like when that is seemingly your response to everything! “There’s this executive course, over on the other side of town, I used to play all the time. It’s small and shitty and almost no one ever plays it.”

I laughed at Summer’s enthusiasm, at this life he kept alluding to, when he’d lived in this town, at whatever his idea of perfection was.

“I’ve only been a couple of times,” I said. Which was close to the truth. “I don’t really know what I’m doing.”

“That’s ok! It doesn’t matter on this course. We’ll just goof around. Get a little high, hit some golf balls.”

I thought about the birds, the trails back up there. Were we already moving on?

“You know what?” Summer looked at me and I could tell another idea had occurred to him that he was excited to share. “I’m a pretty big fan of…”

Summer paused just long enough for my mind to fill in the blank. I don’t know how or why, from having spent the morning with him or in a moment of ESP or something else, I knew exactly what he was going to say. I was in that scene right before your favorite scene in a movie you’ve watched a hundred times, the joys of expectation and anticipation all mixed together with the pleasure of foreknowledge.

“—Mixing nicotine with—” Summer continued.

I heard nicotine as marijuana because that’s what I’d expected to hear and because that’s what I knew he meant. I barely registered what he’d actually said but then, as my brain started to understand the slip, his did too.

“Marijuana, I mean,” he corrected. “I’m a pretty big fan of mixing marijuana with caffeine.”

“Yes!” I responded, almost cutting him off before he’d even gotten it out, so excited for this predicted moment to have come to fruition.

“Yeah?”

“Oh yeah.” I smiled big and goofy, like I was already high. “Sometimes I get a little high and drink an energy drink. There’s something about it.” I tried thinking about how to describe it but all description felt inadequate.

“Ha!” Summer said it, more than he actually laughed. It was oddly endearing. “It’s settled. Let’s go get some coffees, get a little high, play some golf!”

“Is it… expensive?” I asked Summer, sitting in line at the drive-thru, waiting for our order.

“The coffee?”

I laughed a little. “No, no. Golf. I don’t… I don’t really know how much it costs.”

I had no idea how much golf cost. I’d never been, had no frame of reference. I also wasn’t sure how to say that I’d already spent more than I’d really wanted or meant to. The night before, we’d eaten at a Brazilian steakhouse, gone axe throwing, drank at a hipster bar where cocktails took the bartender longer to make than it did for me to drink them and each cost more than I’d usually spend on a whole night out, much less a single drink. I’d wondered if these were all the things the groom had really wanted to do, was that the night he was excited to celebrate with us, or were these just the things he felt like he was supposed to do with a bachelor party’s worth of guys who didn’t know each other? I didn’t know the groom well enough to say. I wasn’t even that sure why I’d been invited. But I had been, and I was honored to be, and had been curious enough, so I’d said yes and tagged along. And no one else ever complained or made any comments about how expensive everything was, so I didn’t either, just spent money I didn’t really have right alongside them. A bachelor party felt like the wrong time for confessions that my life was taking longer than I’d hoped to grow into itself.

“My treat,” Summer said, translating my hesitation. “My idea, I’ll pay for it!”

“Thanks,” I said, as sincerely as I could.

The barista handed me our coffees through the window and I told her thanks, too. She was younger than Summer and I, but old to be working at a coffee shop drive-thru. She had cartoony tattoos up and down both arms, pink hair, these angular glasses that were surprising in their boldness, but looked good on her. How did someone make the decision to go so bold? And what might have happened in her life that had led her to this?

“I bet you have a habit of falling for women who have a habit of falling for you on their breaks from falling for guys who need to be saved,” Summer said, shaking me out of feeling like a judgmental asshole.

I started to drive forward, because we were done and it was time to go, and also wanting to drive away from the possibility of her having overheard Summer.

“What?” I asked. I wasn’t sure how he’d come up with such a complicated way of putting it, or how he’d so clearly seen inside me, opened me up and revealed myself to me.

“Me too,” he said. “That’s how I could tell. I’m in remission though. Like… it’s still in me, like I’m an addict, but I know it about myself now. I’m recovered. In recovery? However you say it.”

“Which way?” I asked. I wanted to ask him to keep explaining whatever he was just saying, but also needed to know where to go.

“Turn right, and then, down there a ways, we’ll get on the freeway for just an exit or two.”

I turned right, and then, down a ways, I got on the freeway.

“Back down the other way is the theater the girl worked at in that one story that went viral.”

“What?” I didn’t know what he was talking about.

He gave me directions the rest of the way as they arose and neither of us again mentioned viral stories or women or tendencies or addiction or recovery or habits or love.

Summer paid for nine holes for both of us for “the little course.” I looked up at the prices on the board, saw different prices for 9 holes and 18 and then for an “executive course.” He added a bag of tees, and then another, and more balls than I thought we’d ever need.

“No way we’ll need all these, but you can keep the leftovers,” Summer said. “A little starter pack for you.”

The course was exactly as Summer had promised—small, shitty, no one else was there. I realized I’d never before even been on a golf course. My perceptions and assumptions were entirely from TV and movies.

Summer took a giant pull on the vape, held it all in for a beat, another, and then blew it out.

“Watch me,” he said. “Do what I do.”

He pushed a tee in the ground, balanced a ball on it. Took a few steps back and sighted the line from ball to hole. He got in position and took a practice swing. I tried to watch how he held the club, how he moved his body and arms, how he swung the club. He took a second practice swing and then stepped up toward his ball and did it for real. The ball zinged straight off into the trees.

“Well,” Summer said. “Not like that.”

“That happen often?”

“All the time. No harm, no foul.”

I wondered if that was the right saying for the moment.

He did it all again—put another ball on the tee, lined up his shot, took a couple practice swings—and this time his shot went more or less straight toward where I assumed it was supposed to go.

“Good enough!” he said. It seemed pretty great to me.

My turn, I tried to do all the same, starting with hitting the vape first, and then everything else. I twisted my body, kept my eyes down on the ball, swung through, looked up and watched my shot somehow travel even straighter and farther than Summer’s.

“A natural!” Summer exclaimed.

I shrugged. “Probably beginner’s luck.”

“Take it! If beginners didn’t have any luck, they wouldn’t have any luck at all!”

Was that a saying? I didn’t think so. But I smiled big. It felt good.

Every now and then I’d hit a shot that went even better than I could have hoped, and then the next two or three or seven would all get lost in the woods or go dribbling a couple feet out in front of me or I’d miss the ball altogether. “Again!” Summer would always urge. “There’s no one behind us, we’re in no rush. Try again!” What a wonderful life, to try and fail and not worry about the embarrassment or penalty. Just try again!

A few holes in, a couple more hits on the vape, it felt like we’d been friends forever, would be bonded for the rest of time.

“Why does everyone call you Summer?” I asked, walking from one hole to the next.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. Is it, like, a nickname or something? I guess I was just curious?”

“Didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s bad luck to ask about someone’s nickname?”

No one ever had. Was that true? I’d never heard that.

“Shit,” I said. “I’m sorry. Never mind.” I closed my eyes tight, rubbed them with my balled-up fist. The whole world was happening in soft focus. Carrie used to say I rubbed my eyes like a baby. I don’t know, it felt good.

“Why’s it called an executive course?” I asked, trying to change directions.

“I’m fucking with you,” Summer said. “It’s just my name. Tom Summer.”

I was a little disappointed I’d asked.

“I don’t know exactly,” Summer said. “They’re short. Only nine holes, usually mostly par 3s. I think they’re intended for when people don’t have time to play a whole round, like executives on lunch, I guess?”

I wondered about that life. Having a job where you could leave for a couple of hours for lunch and play golf. Buy suits, a new car. Go to a bachelor party and not stress over every little dollar.

“This is my favorite hole!” Summer said, when we got to the ninth and final hole.

There was a small pond down near the green, off to the left but stretching out just enough to be an obstruction in a straight line from tee to hole.

“You can go to the right, play it around the pond, easy.” He drew the path with his hand out in the air toward the hole. “But it’s only 150 yards. You can go straight over the water, land it right on the green. It isn’t easy… but holy shit it feels good when you land one.”

I looked at the flag from where we stood on the tee.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m going to hit it straight into the water.”

“That’s ok! And then you’ll try again! That pond is a graveyard of optimism.”

Later, I’d think about how that didn’t really make sense. Or, it made sense, but sounded negative. In the moment though, it sounded just the opposite. Reassuring. Inspiring.

“But it’s up to you,” Summer added. “Whatever feels right.”

I again considered the space between here and there. It looked possible.

“I’m going to go over,” I said.

“There you go!” Summer said. “Executive decision!” he added after a beat. I could almost feel it having occurred to him. I laughed and Summer laughed and then we both laughed and laughed and laughed.

Summer and I took turns driving ball after ball after ball, each one careening off left or right, or straight into the pond. After losing so many into the woods or into the parking lot, the plop of a ball into the water at least felt a little satisfying.

I lost track of how many balls we’d lost and, with them, lost all track of time too. It had gone fuzzy, lost all meaning. Maybe time had never mattered in the first place.

I started to wonder if we were ever going to hit a decent shot, if I was going to have to go back to the pro shop just to buy more balls.

And then, I shit you not, he hit a hole in one. Ten, twenty, fifty drives and neither of us had landed a ball anywhere on the green, and then he finally does, and it goes straight into the hole. I wouldn’t believe it myself if I hadn’t been there.

In that moment, I saw the great arc of the rest of my life play out before me. Carrie and I would separate. I’d remarry, have a child, maybe two. As our children grew up, I’d take them golfing, or bowling, or we’d play catch or paint in sketchbooks together; I would encourage, and do alongside them, whatever grabbed their interests and attention, whatever brought them joy. I would try to teach them to allow for moments of surprise in their lives, that life is giant and weird and sometimes even opens itself up for us, lets us witness the impossible.

There were hours left still until Summer’s flight, but per his request, we went straight from the golf course to the airport. I think we both knew anything else would have only been anticlimactic. I dropped him off at departures and then never saw him again. He wasn’t at the wedding, we never happened to run into each other in one city or another. He’d come into my life, given me this gift, and moved on.

When I got home that night, Carrie was gone. She’d left for her work thing by herself after all, or maybe just didn’t want to be there when I arrived and so was out with friends or had gone to a movie or dinner by herself. Maybe she was at that petting zoo. I was asleep by the time she got home and, in the morning, I didn’t ask and she didn’t volunteer.

I never told her—never told anyone—about that hole-in-one. I’m not entirely sure why not. Maybe I foresaw the disbelief in anyone I’d try to tell. Maybe the story wasn’t intended for travel, was meant only to stay right there on that golf course. Maybe I just liked the idea of keeping a miracle all to myself.

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Aaron Burch is the author of Tacoma, A Kind of In-Between, and Year of the Buffalo, among others. He edited the craft anthology How to Write a Novel: An Anthology of 20 Craft Essays About Writing, None of Which Ever Mention Writing, and is currently the editor of the journals Short Story, Long and HAD.

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