Chapter 3: The Porch Light

Joe’s third beer was half empty and warming in his hand, but he didn’t care. The patio chair had molded itself to his back, the sun had dropped low enough to turn the sky the color of a bruised peach, and O’Maley was in the middle of a story about the fourteenth hole that was ninety percent exaggeration and ten percent outright lie.

“I’m telling you,” O’Maley said, jabbing a finger toward Reinhart, “the ball was sitting on the cart path. Clean lie. Except it wasn’t clean because there was a goose. A goose, Reinhart. Standing directly between me and the green.”

“So you hit the goose.”

“I did not hit the goose. I executed a strategic layup that happened to involve a water hazard and the goose was completely fine.”

Washingon, leaned back in his chair with a bottle of water, the man didn’t drink, Joe had noticed, not a judgmental thing, just a preference, raised one eyebrow. “You took a nine on a par four.”

“The goose was a factor.”

The laughter rolled through the patio like a wave, and Joe found himself laughing with it, his shoulders loose, his guard down.

Three beers in and the world had softened at the edges.

Mike DiBenedetto was holding court by the cooler, his booming voice cutting across the yard as he argued with someone about the Mets’ bullpen.

Reinhart was shaking his head at O’Maley with the weariness of a man who’d heard worse lies from better liars.

The grill hissed and popped as Jeff flipped burgers with a spatula, his Yankees cap pushed back on his head, his face split in that easy grin he always wore when he

was hosting.

It felt like old times.

Not the sanitized, careful version Joe had been constructing in his apartment these past months, but the real thing. The casual rhythm of men who’d known each other long enough that silence was comfortable and insults were affection.

Joe took another pull of his beer. The carbonation bit the back of his throat.

“You know,” Jeff called over from the grill, “if you’d come to the Fourth of July thing, you could have been eating Sarah’s pulled pork instead of whatever sad takeout you’ve been living on.”

“My takeout is not sad. It’s ... efficient.”

“Efficient. That’s the saddest word for food I’ve ever heard.”

“Let the man eat his sadness in peace,” Mike shouted. “We all process trauma differently. Some of us golf. Some of us eat egg rolls.”

Joe flipped him off without looking.

Mike cackled.

The conversation drifted. A debate about whether the scramble format should be outlawed.

A retelling of a round in Atlantic City from five years ago that had ended with Reinhart driving a cart into a bunker.

Joe found himself talking, actually talking, not the guarded half-sentences he’d been surviving on since Mexico, but real words about real nothing.

His slice on seventeen. The speed of the greens. The unfairness of Washingon’s suspiciously low handicap.

“It’s not suspicious,” Washingon said, calm as still water. “I practice.”

“Nobody practices that much.”

“You’d be surprised what I make time for.”

There was something in the way he said it, a flicker of dry humor, a suggestion of hidden depths that made O’Maley point at him with his beer bottle.

“This guy’s got secrets. I can always tell.”