Free The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter by Craig Lancaster Page B

my back. I found Hugo at my kitchen table, a dozen pages deep into the Agassi book, and I thought, well, maybe there’s hope for this idea.
    You’ve always got to have hope.

15
    I didn’t hear much from Hugo in the weeks that followed, just assurances that he was reading and taking notes. Meanwhile, the seasons rolled on for me the same as any other year, with the only difference being my mounting dismay at how quickly time seemed to be moving. I made it through state basketball and wrestling, the variances in Gene Trimear’s moods, and advancing gray in my own hair. Life, by any measure except the loss of time, was better than it had been in a long while.
    The weather kissed us with kindness and warmth in early spring. You can’t count on that in Billings, but if you don’t like what you’re getting in the way of weather, you can burn off fifteen minutes on some other pursuit and the outlook will change.
    The inconvenient math of opposite schedules kept Lainie and me apart more than w e’d have liked, but we had a standing Friday golf date. W e’d move the venue around—Yegen, Pryor Creek, the rinky-dink little par-three course where sh e’d beat me even more soundly with the negation of my lone advantage, length off the tee. In this game, we had another way to get close to each other, not that we were having any trouble in that department. Most of the time I felt like a giddy teenager.
    Lainie said sh e’d picked up the sport from her late husband, Delmar, a three-time state amateur champion. He taught her well. I grew accustomed to standing in sand traps, unleashing a blue blast of profanity at my ball after a failed attempt to get it onto the green, while she squatted over her own three-foot par putt, trying not to laugh aloud at me. And I’d look up at her there, pretty as could be and hell-bent on making me smile, and my frustration would just cut and run. Somehow, I’d done something right to be with her.
    Rain chased us into the Pryor Creek clubhouse on an April afternoon. I sawed on a steak sandwich while Lainie did the crossword. A hand on my shoulder broke the peace.
    “Hiya, Mark.”
    I looked up and into the face of Hugo’s son. It was disquieting. I hadn’t seen Raj in a couple of years, at least. The resemblance to his daddy had only blossomed with time.
    “Jeez, Raj, here, sit down.” I pulled out a chair, and he poured himself into it. “This is Lainie, my—” I looked at her. We had no terms. She reached out her hand, and Raj shook it.
    “Your what?”
    “I’m his girlfriend,” Lainie said. “He keeps wanting to say wench, but we’re slowly breaking him of it.”
    I swatted her with the newspaper. “Shush, you.”
    I sat back down. “You playing golf?” I asked Raj, feeling an immediate flush of foolishness at the question. My grasp of the obvious was airtight.
    “Yeah, meeting some buddies.”
    I leaned into the table, voice a register lower. “You’ve heard, I guess.”
    Raj sat back, lacing his fingers behind his head. “Yeah. Saw it in the paper. He called me a couple of days later.”
    “I haven’t talked to him in a while. What’s he doing?”
    Raj gave me a searching look. This wasn’t our pattern. For years, I’d been the one who gave him information about his old man on the sly. I nodded my head toward Lainie, my distraction from my usual interests.
    “Working for Feeney, I guess. It was a short conversation. You know how it is.”
    “I do.”
    Lainie cut in to save us from the conversational cliff. “What do you do, Raj?”
    “I’m at Rocky Mountain College.”
    “What are you studying?”
    “Education, but I think I’m going to try for my master’s and become a PA.”
    “PA?” I said.
    “Physician’s assistant,” they said in unison.
    “Good school,” Lainie said. “My husband was the golf coach there.”
    And so it began. My girlfriend—girlfriend!—and Hugo’s son had found common ground, and that pretty well cut me out of the