Kiss My Putt (Summersweet Island 1)

Shaking my head, I drop my arm and walk over to the back of the cart, where my bag is strapped, shoving the 9-iron in and pulling out my wedge.

“I’m on the 7th hole. You want to maybe try caddying before we get to 8?” I ask as I walk by him and back over to my ball ten feet away on the private members’ course of SIG.

“You’re not paying me to be your caddie now. I’m just tagging along for funsies,” Bodhi replies without looking up from his book, with a loud crunch of an apple right when I’m in the middle of a practice swing.

“You don’t cash the checks I do pay you,” I remind him, taking a few more practice swings right next to the ball.

I stopped giving him paychecks years ago when I walked into one of the many vans he’s lived in when we’ve had more than a few weeks off and found two of the paychecks on the floor under a pizza box. After that, I started depositing everything into an account I set up for him to make it easier on Bodhi and so I wouldn’t have a panic attack thinking about all that money just sitting around covered in coffee grounds and God only knows what else. As far as I know, he’s never touched that account. Bodhi gets odd jobs to make cash under the table wherever we are in between my golf schedule, like giving surf lessons, selling fruit at a roadside stand, and he even sang at a wedding reception once in Mexico. He’s a simple guy who only needs money to eat, drink, and for the occasional golf hatred shirt. Today’s shirt is bright yellow with a picture of a bag of clubs next to the puking emoji.

Lining my club up to the ball, I relax into position, looking back up where the hole is and taking a second to gauge the direction and speed of the light breeze coming off the ocean. Eyes back down on my ball, I relax my shoulders and let the mechanics that have been drilled into my brain and my muscle memory take over, my club connecting with the ball right as Bodhi takes another loud crunching bite out of his apple and speaks again.

“Oh, right. Well, I just don’t wanna caddie. I’m at a good part in my book. It’s getting spicy.”

I take a second to watch my ball pitch quickly up into the air and land on the green, slowly rolling over once before dropping into the cup. After close to two weeks of no golf, I discovered during my first game a few days ago that I haven’t gotten rusty. With a satisfied smile, I walk up the hill and across the green to grab my ball before heading back to the cart and Bodhi, who is almost finished with the loudest and crunchiest apple in the world, and right in the middle of a book with a shirtless man on the cover.

My dad thought I lost my mind when halfway through a match in Costa Rica I fired my caddie and hired the young man who looked like he hadn’t showered in a week, hadn’t had a decent haircut in years, and absolutely snuck his way onto the course without buying a ticket because he heard you could get free hot dogs. I was coming back to my bag, and my caddie was handing me a club—I don’t even remember which one at this point—and this homeless-looking surfer double-fisting hot dogs standing behind the spectator rope yells to me through a mouthful of food with mustard on his cheek why it was the wrong club and how my caddie had been trying to screw me over all morning by giving me bad advice. I don’t know what it was about the guy, but I trusted him immediately. I made him throw an extra polo I had in my bag over his faded, ratty T-shirt, and I came back from seventeenth place to finish the match in second.

That decision proved to be the best decision of my life so far. As much as Bodhi hates golf, he knows a shit-ton about it. He’s a math genius and a weather aficionado. In less than a minute, he can do a calculation in his head with the current direction and speed of the wind and adjust for humidity and barometric pressure or some shit and tell me exactly what I need to do and how hard I need to swing to get my ball as close to the cup as possible. Bodhi was the only thing I ever put my foot down about with my dad. I wouldn’t golf if he couldn’t be my caddie. And since my golf game greatly improved after bringing Bodhi on board, he couldn’t argue. Much. He still made it known almost every day how unprofessional Bodhi was and how bad he was for my image.