Trying to pull himself together enough to throw, Geoffrey followed Sven’s instructions as best he could and threw the disc. He frowned as it traveled only half the distance as Sven’s and went wildly to the right. “What the hell?”
“It’s the way you tilted the disc when you threw it. Easily fixed,” Sven said as he shouldered the bag. He headed down the hill and Geoffrey jogged to catch up. He glanced over his shoulder to see the girls on the picnic table getting up and slowly approaching the concrete pad. They were going to follow and Geoffrey couldn’t blame them.
As they reached Geoffrey’s disc, Sven patiently explained where he’d gone wrong with his throw, corrected his stance. This time, Geoffrey focused on following Sven’s instructions as closely as possible and was rewarded with the disc going in the right direction and landing just a few feet away from the metal basket.
“Yes!” Sven shouted, throwing his arms up in the air. “That was perfect!”
Geoffrey had never been big on sports. He’d grown up the little guy. Skinny, asthmatic, and small, he was always overlooked and the last to be picked, so he’d turned to computers. But with Sven there to teach him and cheer him, he thought that he could actually be pretty good at this, that he’d be happy to learn it so that he could walk through this beautiful park with its rolling hills and deep green woods with Sven. That it would be their time. Their thing.
He walked with Sven to where his disc lay in the grass. He put it in the bag and switched out to a mid-range disc. With careful aim and a little less power, Sven easily got the flight of the disc to end with a loud clang as it hit the chains hanging from the top of the basket. A birdie on the first hole.
“Do you remember what it was like to live in Norway?” Geoffrey asked, leading the way over to his disc. He handed over the driver to Sven and accepted the smaller putter of bright orange plastic. He took careful aim and was pleased when the chains hanging down to catch the discs clanged on impact.
“Not really.” Sven shrugged and picked up both the discs from the basket. He put them away in his bag and then led the way to the second hole. “Just bits and pieces. Flashes of school and the house we lived in mostly.”
“Was it hard to learn English?”
“Not really. I was a little slow to pick it up. My accent was horrible. Both my parents were fluent and they started teaching my sister and me at an early age. My older brothers had more trouble because they didn’t get the same early start.”
Geoffrey shoved his hand through his hair, wiping away some of the sweat that had started to accumulate at his temple. “I can’t imagine what that must have been like. Packing up everything and moving to a new country when you were a kid. New language. New culture. New rules. All of it so weird.”
Sven stopped on the concrete pad, his hand in his bag, but his head was cocked to the side as he looked at Geoffrey. “Frustrating, mostly. Things would be different and my parents couldn’t really explain why. Just that it was how they did things here. You get overwhelmed because everything feels strange. But my parents made sure to keep some things from our home. They wanted us to adapt to our new life in Michigan and accept it, but without losing our homeland.”
“A mix of new and old.”
“Exactly.” Sven took aim and threw his disc, getting it to cut through the air so that it dropped just a dozen yards away from the basket.
Geoffrey took the disc that Sven selected from him—this one a bright neon green with a slightly different lip along the interior edge that allowed him to get a better grip. He took aim and paused as Sven corrected his stance and hold. When Geoffrey released the disc, he held his breath, watching it carve through the air along a similar path to land just a few feet behind Sven’s.
Jumping in the air, he shouted and cheered, not caring if he looked like an idiot in the process. Sven was laughing and that was all that mattered.
“Look at that!” He pointed at the bright green disc in the dark grass. “I’m catching up to you!” He pulled out his phone to take a picture as they walked closer, but Sven put his hand over the phone.
“No social media today. It’s safer. Plus, I…I just want this to be us.”
It wasn’t until Sven had said the words that Geoffrey realized he hadn’t made a post in hours. Not to announce what he was doing, what he was wearing, or who he was with. Nothing. And he liked it. He liked that it was just them and the rest of the world wasn’t watching and commenting.