Mohawk

pressure beneath deceptive white skin. He wonders, as he has since he was a kid, what magic is used to keep them from exploding. He gives the ball a heave in the general direction of the eighth green, watching its arc. But he can barely see the flag waving beyond the fence and cannot tell whether the ball has landed on the green. He flings another. It takes him twenty minutesto empty the bucket. Just as he unloads the last ball, the face of a teenage boy appears above the back fence. Undaunted by the frigid weather, he has undoubtedly sneaked on the course at number seven to get in some practice. He doesn’t look particularly bright. “Hey! What are you doing?”
    “Golfing,” Dan tells him. “What does it look like?”
    The boy stares stupidly, first at Dan, then at the green, now littered with over a hundred golf balls. “Which one is mine?”
    “They’re all yours.”
    “Really? You don’t want them?”
    “What good are they?”
    “Jeez, I’ll take them,” the boy says, and disappears.
    “You do that.”
    After a while the patio door slides open and Diana comes out. Watching from the kitchen window, she has waited until she thinks her husband will accept her company. In fact he’s glad to have it. From behind his chair she rubs his shoulder blades, and he smells the reassuring perfume she has worn since she was a girl. “I love you, you know,” she tells him.
    “Of course you do.” He smiles. “Who wouldn’t? A big, virile hunk of guy like me?”

18
    “Look at
you
,” said Harry when the front door to the Mohawk Grill swung open and Dallas Younger sauntered in out of the gray afternoon. One of Harry’s regulars, Dallas usually came dressed in work clothes, but today he wore a fresh shirt, neatly pressed pants and a Madras sportcoat that represented a momentary lapse in judgment. The lapse in judgment had not been in buying the coat, but rather in accepting it, because somebody, Dallas couldn’t remember who, had given it to him, and this was the first time he had worn it. It had hung in the closet for over a year and for the last several months he had puzzled over its origin. The coat wasn’t the sort of thing he lost sleep over, though. Things came and went in Dallas’s life, and provided they came in at roughly the same rate as they went out, that suited him fine.
    He was prepared for some razzing. As Harry opened his mouth to speak, Dallas held up one hand. “I always like to look my best when I’m in a classy place, Harry.” He chose a stool near the center of the counter.
    Harry had been of two minds about opening. He knew there would be no business to speak of. Christmas and Thanksgiving were two holidays when lonely people felt self-conscious about eating in places likehis. Most would skip the meal entirely before they’d admit they’ve no place better to go. Like them, Harry had no better place, so he opened. “You must be on your way to see your ex,” Harry said slyly. He was nobody’s fool. Not that you had to be genius to read Dallas Younger.
    “My kid,” Dallas corrected him.
    “Uh-huh.”
    “I’ll take a cup of coffee if you aren’t too busy.”
    Harry poured it and slipped a nondairy creamer on the side of the saucer. Dallas took the creamer and threw it playfully back at him. “Fifteen years I’ve been drinking coffee in here and you never got it right yet.”
    Harry tossed the creamer back in the bin with the others, happy to have saved it. Coffee cost the same one way or the other, and he liked the sensation of having made more money when his customers drank it black. “I never see her on the street,” he observed.
    Dallas shrugged. “You know how it is when you’re too good.”
    Harry had seen Dallas’s wife only once or twice before they split up but not once since her return to Mohawk. Still, she was not easily forgotten, and it made him feel sorry for Dallas to have lost someone so good-looking. Harry himself had lost his share of girls, but none of them were the sort you spent your life mooning about when they were gone. “I got some turkey and dressing,” he offered. “Green beans, too. The whole shot for two and a quarter.”
    Dallas shook his head. “I’m supposed to be there for dinner.”
    Harry wasn’t surprised. “I haven’t served one dinner today,” he admitted.
    “I couldn’t believe you were open. Too bad yourillegitimate nephew isn’t around. He’s pretty good at scarfing up food.”
    Harry involuntarily looked over at