‘But I’m interested in thinking about the future now.’

‘Well,’ she said. She smiled at him. ‘That’s good. I’m glad to hear that. I’m sure Joe’s glad of it, too.’ And then we ate dinner.

The next afternoon, though, at the end of the driving range by the willows and the river, my father was in a different mood. He had not given a lesson that week, but wasn’t tense, and he didn’t seem mad at anything. He was smoking a cigarette, something he didn’t ordinarily do.

‘It’s a shame not to work in warm weather,’ he said and smiled. He took one of the golf balls out of his basket, drew back and threw it through the willow branches toward the river where it hit down in the mud without a sound. ‘How’s your football going,’ he asked me. ‘Are you going to be the next Bob Waterfield?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘I won’t be the next Walter Hagen, either,’ he said. He liked Walter Hagen. He had a picture of him wearing a broad-brimmed hat and a heavy overcoat, laughing at the camera as he teed off someplace where there was snow on the ground. My father kept that picture inside the closet door in his and my mother’s bedroom.

He stood and watched the lone golfer who was driving balls out onto the fairway. We could see him silhouetted. ‘There’s a man who hits the ball nicely,’ he said, watching the man take his club back smoothly, then sweep through his swing. ‘He doesn’t take chances. Get the ball in the middle of the fairway, then take the margin of error. Let the other guy foul up. That’s what Walter Hagen did. The game came naturally to him.’

‘Isn’t it the same with you,’ I asked, because that’s what my mother had said, that my father had never needed to practice.

‘Yes it is,’ my father said, smoking. ‘I thought it was easy. There’s probably something wrong with that.’

‘I don’t like football,’ I said.

My father glanced at me and then stared at the west where the fire was darkening the sun, turning it purple. ‘I liked it,’ he said in a dreamy way. ‘When I had the ball and ran up the field and dodged people, I liked that.’

‘I don’t dodge enough,’ I said. I wanted to tell this to him because I wanted him to tell me to quit football and do something else. I liked golf and would’ve been happy to play it.

‘I wasn’t going to not play golf, though,’ he said, ‘even though I’m probably not cagey enough for it.’ He was not listening to me, now, though I didn’t hold it against him.

Far away at the practice tee I heard a thwock as the lone man drove a ball up into the evening air. There was a silence as my father and I waited for the ball to hit and bounce. But the ball actually hit my father, hit him on the shoulder above the bottom of his sleeve–not hard or even hard enough to cause pain.

My father said, ‘Well. For Christ’s sake.