Page 203 of What We Bury

Dean. Posted up somewhere with a coffee and a newspaper he isn’t reading, watching Sage and Amy talk through whatever there is to talk through after yesterday’s Tyler tantrum. Public was the right call. Public means that man-child can’t walk in and turn it into theater, the way Tyler turns everything into theater. We are, as a unit, developing a very specific and growing dislike for Tyler.

ME:

Good. Hudson plan?

KNOX:

Sent to Odin this morning. Locked in.

So that’s done. Job is three days out, final logistics in Odin’s hands, and every major variable nailed flat. I should feel the way I always feel when a plan goes rigid and clean.

Instead I’m standing on a lawn bowls green in a town full of retirees, about to lose at a sport designed for people with hip replacements.

Fuck.

“HOLDEN!”

I watch as a woman pops out a set of dentures, placing them on the chair beside her.

Good God. Perhaps I can still escape.

“HOLDEN! Look at my shoes!”

Milo is on the edge of the green in a pair of flat white loaner shoes a size too big, holding them up one at a time like a toddler showing off new sandals. He’s also holding a bowl—not a ball, abowl, a fat black weighted thing the size of a grapefruit—and a brightly colored one in lurid teal that stands out among the sober black balls the old-timers are using like a clown at a wake.

“They make you wear flat soles so you don’t wreck the green,” he says, delighted, when I reach him. “These arecommunal. A thousand pensioners have stood exactly where I’m standing. Generations of feet have been embraced by these supportive arches.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“It’sbeautiful. Here. I got you a beer.”

I accept it begrudgingly. He grins at me like a man who’s just successfully bribed a judge.

“You’re early,” I say, taking a sip.

“I’m always early when there’s a trophy on the line.” He hefts the teal bowl, rolling it palm to palm like he’s been doing it for years. “And you’re going to want to watch my form. The lady running the raffle walked me through it. There’s abias—the balls are called ‘woods’ and they’re weighted, so they curve. You don’t roll at the jack, you roll the wood so it curves to where the jack isgoingto be. It’s like baseball only for people who can’t run.”

I look at him. I look at the green, the hats, the little white jack at the far end like a lost golf ball, the man asleep in the deck chair.

“Milo.”

“Mm?”

“You know you said bowling, right? This is lawn bowls.”

“Obviously.” He doesn’t blink. “Lawn bowls is the thinking man’s bowling. A noble and ancient sport. I chose it for us, as a unit, deliberately, because I felt we needed something with a little—” he gestures grandly at the thirty retirees in white “—serenity.”

“You told the group chat there was a trophy shaped like a pin.”

He frowns. “And?”

“There are no pins here, Milo. There has never been a pin on this lawn. Not to mention that the people competing for it have pacemakers.”

“The trophy is a pin,” he protests. “Look, Cliff over there is wearing last year’s.”

Sure enough, the old guy nearest to us is wearing a set of small decorative pins on his wide-brimmed hat.

I shake my head.