Free I'd Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them by Jesse Goolsby

prayer in front of people in ten hours. He is still clean.
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    On the eleventh hole of the Broadmoor’s West Course, Armando clips his tee shot off to the left and the white ball splashes into a pond. Early afternoon and the clouds have begun to gather over the peaks. He reaches into his bag for another ball, but he’s out. He’s a poor golfer, which he accepts, but he still waits a second before asking his mother for one of her balls. She used to be a scratch player but now carries a four handicap. “My car-crash four,” she calls it. She still maintains an effortless swing, but there’s a hitch now when the weight transfers to her damaged left leg, as if she tries to stop everything a split second before it happens.
    Armando’s mother wears a blue visor and a form-fitting white polo. She is thirty-six years old and attractive, her slim waist and long hair often a target of silent male acknowledgment. Armando notices the minor nervousness of the two strangers who play with them. One wears a bright yellow shirt. The other, he overhears, is a retired Air Force Academy economics professor. Mr. Yellow Shirt shifts his gaze to the sky and smirks each time Armando’s mother flattens her back and sticks out her butt during her preshot routine.
    Armando’s parents married when his father was twenty-two and his mother nineteen. He was a return missionary from England, smart enough to showcase a sliver of his bad-boy status by drinking Coke and growing long sideburns. His mother was a sophomore at Cornell. Within a year of their marriage she was pregnant with Armando. His father never finished his studies at Brigham Young, opting for a decent-paying job in the diamond business, but his mother keeps her framed diploma in their study on the wall above their new Apple computer.
    While always weary of the attention his mother’s beauty receives, Armando is proud of her golf talent when they are alone on the course, but he’s not thrilled to be humbled in front of strangers—including a stranger who responds to “Colonel”—by asking his mother for a ball, which he knows will be a pink Slazenger.
    â€œNeed one, Mom,” he says.
    His mother opens the side of her golf bag and reaches in, and he sees a gun among the golf balls—his father’s black 9-millimeter. The Colonel and Yellow Shirt don’t notice, and Armando’s body clenches.
    â€œIn the ancient days these used to be made by stuffing goose feathers in a leather pouch,” his mother says, impersonating her husband’s voice. She fingers the ball before tossing it over. “Swing hard.” She grins.
    The rest of the round Armando catches himself staring at the Ping logo on his mother’s bag, thinking about the weapon behind the light-blue fabric. He loses two more of his mother’s golf balls and each time watches as she unzips the bag and chooses a replacement.
    On the way home he works up the courage to ask about the handgun, but his mother strikes first. “Tell me about Marie. How much should I be worried?”
    That night he and his mother sit at the kitchen counter eating chocolate pudding.
    â€œYou had a gun today,” he says. “In your bag.”
    She swallows a bite, then takes her spoon and swirls the remaining pudding in her bowl. Her elbows rest on the polished granite slab.
    â€œYou never know,” she says. The tone in her voice signals the end, but Armando presses.
    â€œFor bear?”
    â€œYou never know.”
    â€œWhere else?”
    â€œLet’s see,” she says. “I carry a smaller one pretty much everywhere. I don’t care if you know, but don’t tell your sister. Got it?”
    â€œTo Broncos games? Supermarket?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWhy?”
    She spoons up some pudding and eats it.
    â€œI grew up with guns, and you drive around long enough and you see bad situations. It always comes across as this random