The Island
Chick

The rain came out of nowhere, the way it does in August. One minute we were reading a double-breaker on the 9th at PopStroke The Colony, the next we were running for the patio like two women in a movie who don't yet know they're in love. We knew. It was our third date. But still.

Under the awning, damp and laughing, she said, "I want something that tastes like a vacation." The bartender nodded, the way a surgeon nods.

The Island Chick. Bacardi Rum, the bright kind. Myers Dark Rum, deep as a ship's hold. Disaronno Amaretto, a whisper of almond, a little bit of Sinatra in a glass. Mango real, ripe and golden. Orange juice. Pineapple juice. And grenadine, poured last, sinking slowly through the gold like a sunset that couldn't wait for evening.

She held it up to the gray sky. It glowed anyway.

I tasted hers. Then I ordered my own. Sweet, tropical, a warm hum of rum underneath, a rum punch in its Sunday best, the kind of drink that makes you forget the radar map entirely.

The rain stopped twenty minutes later. The greens steamed. We walked back to the 9th, and she sank the putt she'd been staring at when the sky opened up.

"Tell me that wasn't the rum," she said. I didn't tell her anything. I just wrote down her score.