Farm Fresh
Flatbread

Late June. The air thick and sweet as a peach. My daughter, home from her first year of college, had challenged me to eighteen holes at PopStroke Cedar Park "for old times' sake," which is a phrase children use when they intend to humiliate you.

By the 9th she was up four. She read greens like she'd written them. A double-breaker off the top tier, a long, curling thing that should have been impossible, and she just tapped it and walked after it before it dropped.

At the turn I steered us to the patio and ordered. Something farm fresh, I thought, something wholesome, something that would remind her I raised her.

The Farm Fresh Flatbread arrived crisp and wide, a flatbread pizza with manners. Oven-roasted tomato underneath, rich and slow. Melted mozzarella stretching from every slice like it didn't want to let go either. Roasted corn, sweet as summer. Avocado, cool and buttery. Little crumbles of goat cheese, tangy as a teenager's reply. Balsamic onions, dark and jammy. Fresh basil, torn and fragrant, and a drizzle of olive oil catching the light. You can add chicken. We didn't. It was perfect as it was.

She ate three slices standing at the patio rail, putter tucked under her arm.

I sank a twenty-footer on the 18th. She lost by three.

"You let me win," I said. She smiled and took the last slice. That's how I knew.