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do,” says Noah, pouring himself a bowl of Cheerios.
    “You’ve won tournaments before, Travis. This was different.”
    “Not in a good way. It turns out I couldn’t have been more wrong about Peters.”
    “You’ve always disliked him.”
    “For no good reason. In our meeting with Finchem, he defended me like Clarence Darrow. Insisted the whole thing was his fault.”
    “Maybe it was.”
    “And I assume you haven’t forgotten the part about me being suspended for six months.”
    “That’s unfortunate and unfair. But you’ll come back stronger than ever. We’re sure of it.”
    “You too, pal?”
    “No question,” says Noah, milk trickling down his chin.
    Interjecting reality into this late-night celebration makes me feel like the killjoy I am. Instead, I hoist my Pinot and toast the room. “What a meal! What a wife! What a kid! What a dog!”
    “That’s more like it,” says Sarah.
    “By the way,” says Noah, “did I tell you that even Mr. Wilmot in gym is treating me better?”
    “Big surprise there.”
    After dinner, Noah trudges to bed and Sarah refuses to be talked out of washing the dishes, so I head to the couch with Louie. When he rests his head on my thigh, farts, sighs, and falls asleep, I’m grateful that at least one member of the household isn’t burdened with false illusions.

18
    THE NEXT MORNING, I drop Noah at school, and Louie and I take a drive to the Creekview Country Club, which is as deserted as it should be on a Wednesday morning in mid-January. I park in the rear corner, and the two of us set out up the first fairway, following the cart tracks left from my grandfather’s funeral. Three weeks later, the ground is still frozen, but the temperature has soared into the high twenties, and the air is heavy with forecast snow.
    On the first green, Louie and I find the spot where the first installment of my grandfather’s ashes were scattered, my fallible memory confirmed by Louie’s infallible nose. Whenever things get shaky, and sooner or later they always do, my first instinct is to go talk to Pop. It’s been that way since I learned to walk, let alone swing a 7-iron, and it’s not going to change now just because he’s dead. Gazing down at the green, I fill him in on what happened in Hawaii, from the last hole of regulation to the only hole of sudden death. Then I get him up to speed on my visit to the Ding Dong and Finchem’s office before Louie and I move on.
    Over the years I’ve gotten almost as much comfort from this old golf course as I have from my grandfather. It’s not only where I learned to play, it’s where over the course of thousands of rounds, I literally grew up. Or tried to. Even here, however, I can’t escape the harsh glare of self-scrutiny, set off by Peters’s unexpected support. As Louie and I wander in the cold from hole to hole, I rewind as much of my first fifty-one years or so as I can stomach, searching for an occasion, or preferably more, when I behaved as generously.
    Ten holes later, I haven’t come up with one. There is, however, no shortage of cringeworthy moments, incidents so damning I’m not going to share them now. Whenever I think I’ve unearthed something I can hold up in my defense—“Your Honor, I refer you to exhibit one A”—I soon see through it for what it was, a transparent attempt to impress a girl, or a friend or a college admissions staff. As far as I can tell, my only genuine acts of kindness have been directed at Sarah, Elizabeth, Simon, and Noah, and they’re simply an extension of myself and inadmissible as evidence.
    Being back on home turf isn’t doing much for me, but Louie is having a blast. I know every blade of grass on these suburban sixty acres, but for Louie it’s all thrillingly new, and he is beside himself at having the run of such a vast, fascinating tract. Like a canine Columbus wading ashore in the New World, he races from tree to bush to rock, raising a leg and planting the flag of Louie.
    On