Buffalo Chicken
Tender Salad

It had rained all morning. By two o'clock the clouds had given up, and the greens at PopStroke Cedar Park were running fast and slick, like they'd been polished by somebody with a grudge.

Dominic, my rival since the third grade, stood over a downhill slider on the 12th. Eight feet. A left-to-right break that whispered rather than shouted. He barely touched it. The ball crept, hesitated, considered its options, and dropped.

He looked at me the way a cat looks at a bird. I needed something with heat: a buffalo chicken salad, and not a timid one.

Hand-breaded chicken tenders, fried golden and crisp, then tossed in Buffalo sauce, the color of a sunset over a stadium parking lot. Laid over crisp romaine. Celery and carrots, cool and crunchy, the loyal opposition. Onion. Tomato. Cucumbers, cold as a creek in March. And blue cheese, bold and unapologetic, the kind of flavor that wins arguments.

For the cautious among us, there is a grilled option. Dominic took it. I said nothing. Silence is its own kind of trash talk.

I ate with my fingers on the patio, the air still smelling of wet grass, the sauce warming me from the collar down.

On the 13th I drained a twenty-footer uphill, and I swear I could still taste the Buffalo when it fell.