The what-ifs circled him like moths. What if Marcus had spun out of control thirty feet later? What if Sawyer had caught up to him faster? What if he’d chosen not to pursue at all, and instead called for extra backup or air support, or picked any of the hundreds of other options open to him that night?
You wouldn’t be here. A walking mountain of regret who plods through a frosty golf course in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere. Even the joy in Molly’s voice, still ringing in his mind, wasn’t enough to drown out that kind of dark roar.
Chapter Three
Tuesday afternoon arrived, bringing Zack’s first lesson at the golf course. As Molly dropped her son off at the resort, Sawyer could see a mixture of excitement and worry warring on her features. There was a compelling, unnerving kind of beauty in how deeply she cared.
Sawyer wondered if he should admit that the same was going on inside his own chest. I have no idea what I’m doing. And I can’t mess this up.
Fortunately, Zack gave Sawyer little chance to mull over his thoughts. Instead, the boy churned through a dozen worried questions before they even made it up the walk to the pro shop. Sawyer began to wonder if he’d just signed up for the longest hour of his life.
Zack stared at Sawyer’s bag of clubs. Some of them practically came up to the boy’s chest. The kid seemed small for his age and Sawyer knew he was a tall man. Zack eyed the clubs, which must have seemed massive, with dismay. “There’s no way I can hold those.”
Sawyer picked up his bag and shifted it to his other shoulder, away from Zack. “Of course not. These are yours.” He pointed to another set of clubs leaning against the pro shop wall. “Most of them aren’t much different than the ones you used at the mini-golf course. I guessed your height, but I think I got it right.”
In a fit of surprise initiative, Sawyer had contacted the resort’s pro shop to see if there was a children’s set he could borrow. If Zack took to the game, Molly would need to buy him his own set, but that was a problem for another day.
Zack stared in wonder at the pint-size four-club set. It’d be weeks before the kid used anything but the iron or maybe the putter, but Sawyer figured Zack would want the consistency of having the same set each time. Plus, half the fun of golf was the gear, even if the thing looked like his own large golf bag had sprouted off a tiny newborn version.
Sawyer ignored the little tug he felt as Zack hoisted the small bag over his right shoulder exactly as he had. There was even a smile or two from a foursome of grandmother types getting into their cart to head to the first tee. Sawyer couldn’t quite work out how the kid managed to look so cute and so terrified at the same time.
“Are we gonna play in front of all those people?” Zack gulped as they walked through the line of golfers loading bags into carts. He’d tried to pick a time when the course wasn’t crowded, but it seemed any other people was too much of a crowd for Zack.
“No,” Sawyer replied, glad he’d opted for this session to be on a small patch of green behind one of the maintenance sheds. Quiet and out of sight, Sawyer could feel Zack’s tension ease as he realized they’d be hidden away here.
Things sort of went downhill from there.
Thirty minutes later, Sawyer found himself grasping for ways to keep Zack’s anxious frustration under any kind of control.
“It won’t go!” the boy shouted as his plastic Wiffle golf ball veered away from a wide circle Sawyer had spray-painted into the grass. “I can’t get it to go.”
The difference between the hand rolling “pizza golf” and the complexities of holding and aiming a golf club confounded Zack faster than Sawyer would have ever thought possible. The more wound up the kid became, the less he seemed able to master his hands to get any kind of control.
Why did I ever think this would work? After all, if anyone could teach anyone to play golf, why did courses invest in legions of pros? What had ever made him think this was a good idea?
Not what. Who. Molly needed this. He couldn’t stomach the thought of letting her down.
“Okay,” Sawyer said. “How about we stop for a moment.”
Zack’s child-size growl both struck a nerve and a funny bone in Sawyer. He certainly knew what it felt like to slam up against a brick wall no one else could see. As if the one thing he couldn’t get right blocked anything else from ever being right.
Taking the club from the boy’s hand, Sawyer sat down on the curb beside the small patch of grass. He laid the club down on the grass behind him and waited.
After pacing around a bit, Zack sank down beside him, a tiny ball of frustrated gloom. “It’s no fun if I can’t be good at it,” the boy murmured.
“Did you think you’d be good at it today?” Sawyer asked carefully. He’d known golfers who had been at it for decades and still were unhappy with how they played. He was one of them, for that matter—a thought that grew new doubts as to the point of this venture.
“I thought it wouldn’t be so hard,” Zack admitted, scuffing his sneaker on the pavement.
“Hard or new?” Sawyer wasn’t quite sure where the wisdom of that question came from.
Zack looked up at him. “What’s the difference?” It wasn’t a real question. More of a moan of resignation.
“New stuff always feels...lousy at first. At least for me.” He thought about Molly’s nonstop joy, and how foreign she’d find such a statement. She leaped through life like it was all some grand adventure.
And maybe that was half the trouble right there. “For people like your mom, maybe not so much. Seems to me she loves new things.”
Zack’s “tell me about it” frown told Sawyer he’d struck a nerve. “But for people like you and me,” Sawyer went on, “new isn’t much fun.”
Zack looked up at him, a bit stunned. Lots of adults had probably given the kid endless speeches on courage and persistence and optimism and whatnot. Zack looked as if no one had ever admitted to him that life felt lousy sometimes. Then again, with a mom like Molly, that wasn’t so hard to believe. While he found Molly’s sunny optimism alluring, being around it all the time could likely be exhausting.
Sawyer went out on a limb. “So you can stop here, if that’s what you want. But you got this set of clubs to use, and you know how to hold them now, too.” Zack had, in fact, taken rather easily to adopting the correct grip of his club, even if the swing had eluded him. “Nothing wrong with saying that’s enough for today. Now you got two things that won’t be new next time, and then maybe the swing part will come to you.”
“Or not,” Zack added with a grumpy pout.
“Or not,” Sawyer agreed. “Either’s okay by me. But I kinda think maybe it’s worth another try.” When the boy looked unsteady, he added, “Back here, where nobody sees or cares how bad we are.”
Using the word we lit some unwanted little glow in Sawyer’s chest that he tried to ignore.
Zack seemed to consider this for a moment. “Mom’ll be mad if I quit.”
While the same thought had crossed Sawyer’s mind, it wasn’t exactly true. “Disappointed, maybe. Not mad. She just thinks this would be fun for you, and she wants you to have fun. Kids should have fun.” That same weird, glowing tug made him add, “Fun seems kinda hard for you. Me, too.”
Hard? Fun felt like it was off the table for the duration of his life. Now it was mostly marking time until everything didn’t feel so awful. For the son of a cop, the nephew of a cop and the grandson of a cop, to be suspended from the force in shame was like cutting off an arm or axing his branch off the family tree.
He’d earned a lifetime of feeling that way for himself, but it seemed wrong for someone Zack’s age to view life as something awful to be endured. Especially with a nonstop happy mom like Molly around. A useful impulse hit him. “Thirsty?” he asked. “We’ve got enough time to stop by the clubhouse and get something to drink.”
“What if
they don’t have orange soda?”
Sawyer noticed the boy had ordered that with his pizza. “I happen to know that they do. Want some?”
Zack shrugged. “Okay.”
It was a better ending to the day than frustration and sour faces. “They make good root beer, too.”
“I saw you drink that at Cuccio’s. Ick,” Zack proclaimed.
“Don’t like it, huh? Yeah, well, it’s an acquired taste.”
“I don’t need to try it to know I’ll hate it. It’s all fuzzy.”
“The foam? Oh, no, that’s the best part. On a good day you get some on your nose and need to lick it off.” Where was this chummy, friendly version of himself coming from? Joking about soft drinks with a second grader? Giving pep talks about golf? Being around Zack was bringing out a strange side of him.
Strange, yes, but not entirely unpleasant. It felt rather good, if he was honest with himself. As if even this failure of a golf lesson might be just the sort of okay-to-stink-at-it experience Molly seemed to think Zack needed.
As he and Zack sat at the outdoor picnic tables waiting for Molly to arrive, they shared their plastic cups of soda. Sawyer caught Zack trying not to stare at the generous dousing of foam that still topped the last bit of his root beer. “I’m telling you,” he said, alarmed to find that his voice sounded almost teasing, “foam beats plain old bubbles any day.”
“Does not.” Pouty words, but the boy’s face held just the smallest hint of a smile.
“Does, too. Not that you’d know, seeing how you’ve never tried it.” Sawyer held up the glass. “Last chance.”
There was just the tiniest hesitation before Zack shook his head.
“Okay, then.” Sawyer drained his glass, making a big show of smacking his lips with enjoyment.
“You didn’t get any on your nose,” Zack pointed out.
“Things don’t always work out the way you plan.” Sawyer took the golf ball they’d been using from his pocket and rolled it across the picnic table toward Zack. He tilted his empty cup against the side of the table the way they had done in Cuccio’s. “Sink it.”
“I’ll miss.”
Sawyer raised an eyebrow. “You know that? For sure? ’Cause I don’t.”
He could read Zack’s features so easily—the worried brow, the darting eyes, the fidgeting fingers. Something told him to wait the boy out, to give him this chance to decide on his own without nudges or encouragement.
Just as Molly’s car was pulling up, Zack rolled the golf ball across the table to sink with a soggy but victorious plunk.
“Hole in one,” Sawyer declared, almost embarrassed by the smile he felt stealing across his face.
“That’s not a hole in one,” Zack refuted.
“Trust me. On a lousy day, that’s a hole in one. Besides, it doesn’t feel so lousy now after all, does it? See what I mean about once things aren’t new?”
Molly waved enthusiastically from her car window. The desperate sort of optimism in her eyes did things to the space under his ribs. He didn’t know what to do with all the faith she was putting in him. She would indeed be heartsick if this—whatever this was—didn’t help Zack. The knowledge sprung an odd surge of...of what? With a start Sawyer realized it was determination. Weird, new and definitely uncomfortable.
But not at all bad.
* * *
Molly counted the minutes until Sawyer walked in the door of The Depot the next morning. It had taken superhuman effort not to call the man last night when they got home from the grocery store after the golf lesson.
Most times she tried to do grocery shopping without Zack. The myriad of choices seemed to wind him up, and he was so particular about things that even the smallest adjustments—having to get a different kind of ketchup, for example—could send him into one of his tailspins.
It hadn’t been nearly as bad this time. He kept mumbling something about “new” or she thought she heard him say “lousy” a couple of times, but Zack would refuse to explain himself when she asked.
The final aisle, the one where they kept the soft drinks, had been the showstopper. It had taken all her strength not to gasp in astonishment when Zack had made his surprise request.
“Root beer?!” she nearly shouted at Sawyer the moment he came through the door.
While a smile didn’t reach his whole face—it never did—a bit of brightness sparked in his eyes. It sent her pulse jumping in ways that had nothing to do with a mother’s gratitude.
Molly slid the ready coffee toward him, placing a cookie on a napkin right beside it. “The cookie’s also on the house if you can tell me how it is that you convinced my son he might want to try root beer? A new drink?”
Sawyer took the cup with just the tiniest hint of victory. “He did that?”
“So you didn’t feel the world tilt last night? Because I did, in Becker’s grocery store.”
“We talked about the virtues of root beer, that’s all. He told me he didn’t like it. He also told me he’d never tried it.”
Molly nodded. “Oh, I’ve had that conversation before. About a thousand times. Usually without any success.”
“Did he like it?”
Molly let her grin drop. “No. Actually, he said it was ‘lousy.’”
“Oh.”
When Sawyer looked disappointed, Molly added, “But that’s hardly the point. He tried it. He tried it. Do you have any idea how huge that is?”
“I’m guessing it’s a big deal.” He took a bite of the cookie—macadamia nut chocolate chip—and nodded his approval. She’d hidden the last one under the counter just so he’d get what she considered the best cookie The Depot served.
“How did you do it?” She really wanted to know. A small bit of her was even jealous he’d made such a breakthrough in a single afternoon when she felt as if she’d been struggling with Zack forever. It was like her grandpa who would walk into the room, glance at the puzzle she was working on and find the piece that had eluded her for an hour. You were happy something was accomplished, but it stung that it wasn’t you that pulled it off. You asked him to help, she reminded herself. Just be happy that he has.
Sawyer leaned against the counter. It was the first time he didn’t look in such a hurry to leave. “I’m not really sure. The golf thing didn’t go that well, actually. I just took him into the clubhouse for a soda when his frustration got the better of him.”
“You must have said something important. He kept muttering to himself about ‘new’ and ‘lousy.’”
That seemed to prick the man’s memory. “Well, I did tell him that most new things feel lousy at first.”
That seemed like a terrible way to view the world. “How on earth did that help?”
“Have you ever noticed your tendency to be wildly overoptimistic?”
That was a loaded question. And a far cry from their usual morning small talk over his daily coffee. Molly’s spine stiffened in a defensive response. “Are you saying I’m too happy to help my son?” The urge to spill everything wrong with her life—the divorce and the cancer and the sleepless nights—rose up out of nowhere.
Sawyer seemed to realize he’d touched a nerve. “I’m saying you don’t think like him. I get how he thinks. Maybe he just needed to know he wasn’t the only person in the world who thinks the way he does.” He gave her something close to a grin. “You can be a bit of a flood of sunshine, if you hadn’t noticed.”
That statement just might take the cake for the world’s most backhanded compliment. And from Sawyer Bradshaw. Life was chock-full of surprises this week.
Molly offered the thing she should have said from the first: “Thank you. For whatever you did for Zack. It means the world to me.”
“It was just a root beer, Molly.”
Her attention always caught in a strange way when he used her name. He was such a closed pe
rson that any little slip of connection like that stood out. “You’re wrong, Sawyer. It was a whole lot more than that. And I’m grateful.”
He looked as if he was turning to go, and Molly found herself wanting to make him stay just a little longer. She wanted to know why he never really smiled. Why he seemed eager to shrink from the world. She wanted to know more about this man who’d fostered an impossible connection to her son without any effort. She wanted to know why God had nudged her—no, shoved her—into putting this man into Zack’s life. Nothing about it made sense, but clearly it had some purpose. She just couldn’t see that purpose yet.
“What about the golf part? The way he looked at the clubs last night, I couldn’t tell if he thought they were friends or enemies.”
Sawyer let loose a small laugh at that. “I could name a dozen golfers who feel the same way. He’s just—” he looked up at the ceiling as if the right word was hanging there “—clumsy with them. For now. He knows what needs to happen, but he can’t quite find the coordination to make it happen.”
Zack never looked as if he was at home in his body. “He’s always been a bit of an ‘indoor cat,’ as my grandpa used to say. That’s part of the reason golf might work, according to Mrs. Hollings. A place to burn off all the physical energy of those anxieties.” Rather than voice her fears that this strange experiment might not work, might just pile on to the failures Zack saw for himself, she began wiping down the counter. Being so quick to get her hopes up made for a roller coaster of an emotional ride parenting Zack, always had.
“Did you ask him if he still wants to come next time?”
She’d been dreading it. She’d be so elated if he continued on, and so disappointed if he didn’t. “Not yet.”
Sawyer gave her as pointed a look as he’d ever had. “You gotta.”
“What if he says no?” She wished the question didn’t sound so desperate.
“Maybe you could just be happy you got an attempted root beer out of the deal and try again another time.”
A Mother's Strength Page 3
