All Carry: A Novel

Chet glanced up in time to see his mom shaking her head in the rearview mirror.

"Keep talking and I'll turn this car around right now," she said.

"Promise?" Chet said.

"You know, I'm going to make that DNA testing appointment after all," Laurel answered. "You can't be mine. There must have been a mistake at the hospital."

"Was it a secondhand hospital?"

This time Laurel smiled.

"Well played, my little dude."

"Thanks, Mom."

"But he's right, Mom," Chet's older brother, Buddy, said. "This is such a mid way to spend a Friday morning."

"I don't know what that means—'mid,' " she said as she drove slowly through the Arrowhead subdivision in search of driveway bargains. "Translation, please."

Buddy sighed in exasperation. He had just gotten home from Madison three days earlier, his sophomore year at Wisconsin now in the books. His only plans were to sleep late, work little, and party much before his summer  internship began the following week. Getting roll-called out of bed by his mom at seven-thirty on a Saturday morning was a nightmare scenario.

"'Mid' means average, below average," he said, slouched in the front seat of the minivan. "And this is so below average. I can't believe you woke me up for this."

"You can sleep in tomorrow," she said. "But I wanted to get out and about before everything got picked over. This is prime early-bird shopping time."

"Great," Buddy said. "You can never have too many salt and pepper shakers, or puzzles of the Grand Canyon."

"Oh, c'mon," she said. "I bet you loved that puzzle we sent in the care package."

"I almost had to switch frat houses, Mom. Kittens dressed as U.S. presidents? Do you know how humiliating that was? It was—"

"Mid?" she said.

"Negative-integer mid."

"And yet you survived. Now you're helping the woman who bore you. Life's full of trade-offs."

"Seriously, Mom. You're like a thrift-shop addict. You know, they have actual stores where they sell furniture and clothes and books and albums and pepper shakers that no one has ever used."

"Oh, look," she said, ignoring him as she parked the minivan in front of a house with a promising display of merchandise. "Is that an Amish accent table?"

She was out the door and in the driveway before Buddy and Chet could unfasten their seat belts. Buddy pulled out his cell phone and began checking his texts. Nothing. Of course not—everyone he knew was still asleep.

"Buddy!" his mom yelled from the driveway. "Come here and bring me my purse."

Buddy grabbed the worn and weary brown leather bag from the back seat and took it to her. Chet found a place on the front stoop and returned to his video.

As his mom haggled with a young woman over the price of the accent table, Buddy walked into the garage and looked at the items lined up neatly on folding tables. There were American Girl dolls missing assorted limbs, a Chicago Monopoly game, a CD player, a row of Cubs baseball cards in plastic sleeves, a frayed Michael Jordan poster, a Crock-Pot, and an Old Style neon sign. On another table were rows of DVD movies. It was Relicpalooza.

Behind the tables and leaning against the interior wall of the garage were four golf bags, each one in worse condition than the next. An orange Powerbilt bag featured a battered metal driver and a handful of irons covered in dust and spiderwebs. There were several Adams fairway woods in the blue canvas bag next to it. A Top Flite bag with tags from the nearby Arrowhead Golf Club contained nothing more than a sand wedge and a pitching wedge, both gouged and battered to the point of uselessness. Buddy didn't bother with the fourth bag, a strapless white leather MacGregor bag featuring a tear that ran from the top lip to the bottom. There were woods, but each one was covered with an old athletic sock. And the irons had worn plastic covers on them.

Buddy, bored by it all, began to search for his mom. There she was, a floor lamp in one hand, a pepper shaker in the other. He started to walk out of the garage.

"You a golfer?"

Buddy was startled by the voice. He turned, and there in the shadows of the garage doorway leading into the house was an old man sitting in a wheelchair.