Blackberry
Lemon Punch

August. Three in the afternoon. The kind of heat that makes the greens shimmer like they're wavering, though they are not. My old friend Walt and I had not seen each other in eleven years, and we had agreed, wordlessly, to settle everything on the seventh hole at PopStroke Waterford Lakes.

An uphill putt onto the top tier. Twenty-two feet. Walt read it from both sides and declared it straight. Walt has never once in his life been right about a putt.

Then, a small miracle: a server crossing the course with a tray, ice clinking like distant wind chimes. We had ordered from the course, as one is permitted to do here, and our drinks had found us.

Tin Cup rye whiskey, with a backbone you could lean a ladder against. Blackberries, deep and dark as a late-summer bramble behind my grandmother's barn. Simple syrup, smoothing every sharp corner. Fresh lemon juice. And lemonade, cold and bright, the color of a porch light coming on.

I took one sip of that rye whiskey cocktail and the heat surrendered. Not entirely. Enough.

Walt missed his putt left. I missed mine right. We stood there on the tier, the scorecard forgotten in my back pocket, telling each other things we should have said a decade ago, glasses sweating in the sun.

We parred the next three holes. Neither of us remembers how.