Walking with Jack Read Online Free

to the right. “If this was summer and the rough was grown, you would have just lost your fourth ball of the day. Did you bring enough balls to last a week?”
    “Why don’t you pull for me instead of against me,” I said.
    “I’m just telling you what you’re doing wrong,” he said.
    Another train went by. On the Night Rider from London, twenty-two years ago, his mother and I had chosen to sleep under a table because we could be closer to each other on the floor than in our seats.
    I followed Jack down the fairway after finding my ball and hitting two more decent seven-irons to the edge of the green. He stuck a five-iron to five feet and captured an easy birdie. A moment later I made my first par of the day. “Maybe we could sit out of the wind for a while,” I said.
    “Why do you want to do that?” he asked as he began walking to the next tee.
    “So we can talk,” I called to him.
    “I didn’t come here to talk,” he said. “I already told you. I came to play golf.”
    I watched him walking away, his black rain jacket and pants snapping in the wind. Fair enough, I thought.
    I named it Hysterical golf. House of Horrors golf. The wind howling in our ears and blowing us back half a step for every step forward. Hands blue. Feet numb. Our yardage book blown away into the sea and with it the only map we had of the course, so we were blind on almost every shot. Driver cover blown away into the thistle. Balls blown off the wooden tees. And me having to search for my ball every other shot and losing the feeling in my hands. It went on like that to the 18th hole, the famous home hole, a 444-yard par-4 with the Barry Burn winding through a narrow fairway bordered by horrible thistle bushes running down both sides, where you could spend the rest of your life searching for your ball and never find it.
    As we climbed up to the tee, a man and a woman walking a black dog appeared in the rain, the first people we had seen in hours. “Teddy would love it here,” Jack said, referring to one of our golden retrievers who had been born in our living room four years earlier with eight brothers and sisters. Having a litter of pups was the fulfillment of a promise I’d made years earlier to Jack’s sister Cara. My idea all along was that we would sell all the pups, but we kept Teddy.
    “When you leave home, Teddy’s going to have a broken heart,” I said as we both watched the black dog chasing seagulls.
    “Yeah,” Jack said, nodding.
    “The day you leave, he’s going to start spending the rest of his life waiting for you to come back.”
    Jack nodded and teed up his ball. I watched the couple stop and turn toward us. It was another amazing drive, straight down the middle of the fairway and so far I couldn’t quite believe it.
    “I think that cleared all three of the farthest bunkers,” I said.
    “I’m probably in the last one,” he said.
    “I think it’s over,” I said.
    The wind carried my ball a long way as well, and straight for once. “Remember me teaching you to curse in wind like this?” I said as we walked on. “Sailing in our little boat?”
    “I remember,” he said.
    “Each time a wave soaked us.”
    “Son of a bitch,” he said.
    Halfway up the fairway I got such a violent cramp in my right leg that I had to stop for a few minutes. We lay against a bunker blocking the wind. I apologized and lit a cigarette. “Par this last hole and I’ll shoot 77,” Jack said as he went over our scorecard.
    “Amazing in these conditions, and from the championship tees.”
    He didn’t say anything.
    I unzipped a pocket on my golf bag and took out my father’s army diary from boot camp that I’d found in his closet the last time I saw him almost two years earlier. I had decided at the last minute to bring it with me on this trip. I opened it and read aloud:
    Thursday December 7, 1944. The Army dentist pulled all my lower teeth yesterday, and all my uppers this morning. Miserable. Then two hours on the