been in style thirty years ago. He wore a baseball cap and dark glasses and had a thin unattractive mustache.
Something about him seemed familiar though. I watched him walk towards the registration tables, excusing himself as he squeezed through the crowd.
I caught up with Sammy and Aunt Momo. Momo wasn’t actually my aunt, and her name wasn’t really Momo. It was Maureen. But she’d been my mother’s best friend since kindergarten and Momo had been her nickname for longer.
She was also Jake’s mother and technically my stepmom. She’d married my father about a year after my mother died. But since Jake and I had already been fooling around with each other by then, I tried very hard not to think about her that way. Because if she was my stepmom, then technically Jake was my stepbrother, and…no. Just no. That way lay madness.
“Do you know that guy?” I asked them both.
“Which guy?” she asked.
I pointed at the man in the yellow shirt. He had his profile to us and was speaking animatedly to one of his friends.
She looked, started to shake her head, stopped. Looked harder, squinting against the bright sunlight, then shook her head definitively. “No. Kind of looks familiar. Is he an actor?”
I shrugged. “He must just have one of those faces.”
A bell rang, signaling the start of the tournament. Leslie MacMillian moved to the podium that had been set up and laid out the rules of the game. It was a typical scramble format where everyone would tee off and then examined where the balls had landed. All subsequent balls would be played from the best shot lie. There were various entertainments on the course that would raise even more money, including Pay-a-Pro and the marshmallow shots. There would also be food and drink along the course.
Ryan waved me over.
My father gave me a hardy slap on the back when I joined them. “Son.”
I clapped him back on his shoulder. “Father,” I returned with a smile.
Symanski looked the way I’d imagined an investor named Symanski would look: in his mid-sixties and possibly of Eastern European descent. Tall and built like an aging Soviet-era tank, he had thick white hair and broken red capillaries lined a nose that looked like it had been broken more than once. He reminded me a little of Vinny and a little of the father of this Polish player I’d hooked up with a few times. The guy had known his way around a sausage, no pun intended. So had his son. Pun totally intended.
Ryan introduced us, and we shook hands. “Mr. Symanski has some great ideas,” Ryan said. “I thought it was time for you to meet in person.”
“Not now, Ryan,” Symanski said. “First golf and some drinks on this beautiful day, and if Mr. Smallman is interested, we’ll talk business at some later time. Over dinner.”
I’d been half-expecting him to have a thick accent, but he sounded like any number of my father’s friends from the area. “Please call me Eric. And that sounds great,” I said. “Let’s get started, shall we?”
“So, um, I asked if I could be your caddy,” Danny said as if he was confessing.
“Why?” I asked.
He sorted through my clubs. “I’m a fan. I used to watch you play.”
“Really?”
“Really,” he said with a smile. “Is that so hard to believe?”
“Not like I had much of a career and the AHL games are hard to watch.”
He shrugged and handed me my driver. “I like watching all hockey.”
“Not to be rude, but you don’t look like a hockey player.” All of Danny’s strength was in his shoulders and arms, not his thighs and glutes.
“Oh, I’m not. I’m a swimmer. Was a swimmer. I just really like the game. And I used to work at an ice rink back home in Illinois. I may possibly just like the men who play hockey,” he said with a blush.
I laughed and watched my father tee off. After we’d all shot, Ryan’s ball had the best lie, so we carried our balls over to his.
“So, what did you do at the rink?” I asked quietly.
“A little bit of everything,” he said back quietly.
“Are you looking for a job?” I asked.
“Could you guys keep it down,” Ryan said irritably. “This is serious.”
Since there was literally a golf cart kitted out like a mobile bar headed our way, I thought that was a bit of an exaggeration.
Danny rolled his eyes. He blushed when he caught me looking and I laughed.