A Rocket in the Pocket
The air in the office on the third Tuesday is charged with a different kind of electricity. Quinn sits across from Burton, her posture as rigid as a flagstaff, but her eyes are restless. They have spent the last hour dissecting regional demographic shifts, yet her focus keeps drifting toward the window that looks out into the simulator bays where Arby is recalibrating the sensors.
“Burton,” she says, cutting him off mid-sentence about zip code saturation. “I want to change the arrangement. I’d like you to give me my golf lessons. Not Arby.”
Burton pauses, his coffee cup halfway to his lips. “Arby’s the pro, Quinn. He’s got the certifications, the track record. I’m just the guy who signs the checks and plays a decent scratch game. Why the swap?”
She smoothes a non-existent wrinkle in her slacks. “I feel you’ll be better for a beginner. You have more… patience for the fundamentals.”
Burton doesn’t buy it. He can sense a vibrating, ill-at-ease tension in her—a sharp contrast to the “Rice Rocket” who stared down hockey players in Southie. When he approaches Arby later that afternoon, the reaction is immediate and visceral.
“Take her,” Arby spits, slamming a bucket of balls onto the turf. “Gladly. She’s a hard-headed bitch, Burton. Questions every mechanical adjustment, wants to know the physics of the smash factor instead of just swinging the damn club. She’s exhausting.” As he walks away, he tosses a smirk over his shoulder. “Just watch yourself, boss. Make sure you don’t get a rocket in your pocket.”
The comment feels oily, leaving a film on the conversation that Burton can’t quite wash off.
The next six weeks move with the frantic pace of a countdown. While Burton teaches Quinn the geometry of a draw and the soft touch required for a flop shot, she is quietly dismantling and rebuilding his business model.
On the final day of her internship, she doesn’t just hand him a report; she presents him with a 150-page manifesto. It is a masterpiece of data—loaded with vibrant pie charts of market share, tables comparing seasonal utility costs, and graphs that project a vertical climb for indoor golf across the United States. It doesn’t just suggest a future; it maps one out that is undeniably glorious.
“You’re wasted in a restaurant, Quinn,” Burton says, leafing through the heavy binding.
“I’m not wasted anywhere I choose to be,” she counters.
To mark the conclusion of her time, Burton leads her to the back storage room. Resting against the wall is a brand-new set of custom-fitted TaylorMade clubs, the chrome gleaming under the fluorescent lights.
“An internship bonus,” he says. “And an invitation. Join me for eighteen holes at Granite Links this Sunday morning. The business is closed, the course is quiet, and I want to see if my teaching stuck.”
Quinn looks at the clubs, then at him. “One condition,” she says. “You come to lunch afterward. My family’s restaurant.”
“It’s a deal.”
Sunday morning at Granite Links is spectacular. The course, carved out of old quarries, offers panoramic views of the Boston skyline. Quinn impresses Burton immediately. She doesn’t just play; she calculates. She understands the clichés of the game and uses the strategies they’ve discussed to navigate the wind off the harbor.
After a particularly monstrous drive on the ninth hole, a straight, piercing shot that clears the bunkers with room to spare, she leans on her driver and offers a rare, mischievous grin.
“It’s not that different than a slapshot,” she quips. “A little Happy Gilmore for you.”
Burton laughs, but as they walk toward the green, the levity fades. “Quinn, tell me the truth. Why did you really want to stop lessons with Arby? It wasn’t just about my ‘patience,’ was it?”
She goes quiet, her eyes tracking a red-tailed hawk circling the quarry. “He was much too free with his hands,” she says, her voice cold and level. “Adjusting my hips, my shoulders… touching me when a verbal cue would have done just fine. And,” she wrinkles her nose, “he had terrible breath. Like stale cigarettes and old coffee. It made the air feel small.”
Burton feels a surge of hot anger. It isn’t the first warning he’d heard about Arby’s “hands-on” approach with female students, but hearing it from Quinn makes it final. Arby’s time at the facility is nearing its end.
They drive to Pho-745, the North Quincy establishment that has become the anchor of Quinn’s world. There, Burton meets her mother, Linh.
Linh is a revelation. She is tall and slim, dressed in an elegantly tailored silk tunic that feels more like a royal vestment than workwear. She moves through the restaurant with a regal, effortless grace that commands the room without a word being spoken.
While Quinn steps into the kitchen to check the midday prep, Burton finds himself alone with Linh.
“She is incredible,” Burton gushes, his usual composure failing him. “Her mind, her work ethic … I’ve never seen anything like it.” He hesitates, then leans in. “Linh, would I be crazy to ask her out on a real date? Not a business lunch, not a golf round. A date.”
Linh regards him with eyes that have seen the Fall of Saigon and the jungles of the borderlands. She doesn’t smile, but her expression softens. “Kwan Sae is very strong-willed,” she says. “She is entirely self-directed. I have no idea how she will respond to you, Burton. She does not follow scripts.”
Lunch is a feast of the senses. They start with Gỏi Cuốn (fresh spring rolls) packed with poached shrimp and mint, followed by the restaurant’s signature Pho Tai, the broth rich with star anise and ginger, the thin slices of rare beef blossoming in the heat. They finish with Cà Phê Sữa Đá, the potent Vietnamese iced coffee that Quinn jokes is the real secret to her 4:00 AM study sessions.
As the meal ends, Burton takes a breath. “Quinn, the Bruins are playing at The Garden Thursday night. I have seats behind the penalty box. Would you like to go?”
He expects a breakdown of her schedule, a raincheck, or a firm ‘no.’ Instead, she looks at him, wipes a stray drop of coffee from her lip, and says, “Yes.”
Thursday night at The Garden (now The Fleet Center, but always “The Garden” to Bostonians) is a blur of ice shavings and the roar of the crowd. The “Broons” win in overtime, and the energy follows them back to the car. When they reach his condo overlooking the water, Burton feels the familiar nerves of a teenager.
“Would you like to come up for a nightcap?” he asks.
To his amazement, she answers, “Yes.”
Upstairs, over two glasses of aged cognac, the conversation flows without the friction of the office. The “Rice Rocket” and the “Business Owner” disappear, leaving only two people who have survived too much too soon.
“It’s late,” Burton says softly as the city lights twinkle below. “Would you like to spend the night?”
To his amazement, she answers, “Yes.”
The morning sun creeps across the floorboards of the bedroom. As Burton pulls on his shirt, he looks at Quinn, who is already awake, watching the river.
“I’m traveling to Vermont tomorrow afternoon,” he mentions. “Visiting my Dad and Step-Mom over the weekend. It’s quiet up there, lots of trees, no business plans. Would you like to come with me?”
He braces for the reality of her restaurant shifts, her mother’s needs, her career. But Quinn just smiles—a real, unfiltered smile.
“Yes,” she says.
Burton realizes then that Arby was wrong. There is no “rocket in his pocket”—there is only a woman who has finally found someone fast enough to keep up with her.
She’s Not Here
It is a tedious day, the capstone on a month of repetitive mediocrity. Outside, the Boston spring finally asserts itself, the air turning soft and fragrant—ironically bad for business. When the weather is miserable, frustrated golfers are lured to indoor simulators to maintain the fiction of their handicaps. But now that the sun is out, even the “introductory free lesson” leads have dried up. Burton, whose title technically covers marketing, public relations, and overflow instruction, finds himself staring at the same pile of uninspired brochures for hours, his mind a stagnant pond.
Then there is the Arby situation.
He has already spoken to Arby twice about using Burton’s private office. Arby is a talented instructor, but he possesses a moral compass that spins wildly whenever a certain type of woman … specifically one with arms and legs … walks through the door.
The first incident stays with Burton like a bad odor. He returns from a quick sandwich break to find the office door locked from the inside. “Hold on a moment, Burt,” Arby calls out. Burton hovers awkwardly by the putter rack until Arby emerges ten minutes later. Behind him follows a woman Burton recognizes—a sleek, professional type from the high-rise across the street. Her hair is slightly less perfect than it was an hour ago. Arby simply shrugs, a lazy, feline gesture. “She wasn’t feeling well, Burt. Just needed to sit and be for a minute.”
The second time is worse. Burton is on the floor, trying to fix the hook of a fourteen-year-old boy whose father is a regular at Granite Hills. Out of the corner of his eye, he watches Arby lead the boy’s mother into that same office. They have been missing for twenty minutes. When the door finally opens, the mother makes a beeline for the ladies’ room while Arby casually strolls over to offer observations on the lad’s backswing. When he makes eye contact, Arby’s lips curl into a smile, even if his eyes don’t.
Mentally, Burton wants to press him, to demand what kind of “instruction” requires a deadbolt, but the sluggish sales of the previous month have sapped his courage. At this moment, he just wants to get out of town. He wants to head south on the Expressway, past the iconic gas tanks to Pho 475, where he’ll pick up Quinn and whisk her to the green hills of Granite for a “sunset nine” at the local muni. Just the two of them, the smell of cut grass, and the amber light making everything look like a cinematic masterpiece.
The fantasy has become a routine.
After dinner at The Tavern, they head back to his condo for a bottle of wine and a night of bliss that makes Arby and the brochures vanish. In the morning, he gets croissants and her daily Dunkin’—he knows just how she likes it: “regulah” with extra cream. Then, she hops on the Red Line back to North Quincy, and he opens the shop promptly at ten. It is a twice-weekly routine Burton has fallen gleefully into.
He arrives at Pho 475, their staging ground, right on time. Linh is seated near the maître d’s podium, folding napkins into swans. “Hello, Mama-san.” She is neither amused nor offended; her demeanor is always placid. She is a woman of immaculate grooming and a femininity that belies deep strength. She’d make a great poker player, Burton once remarked to Quinn.
“Is it offensive to call you Mama-san?” Burton knows it is risky to use the term. Her expression does not change.
“A little bit. ‘Mama-san’ is a term of authority and respect, but it also shows that when you look at me, you don’t see ‘woman’ or ‘person.’ You see ‘Asian.'”
“Duly noted. I’ll call you Linh.”
“Quinn’s not here,” Linh says. Or more accurately, “She not here.” Her English is practiced but lacks the casual structure of a native speaker. Burton’s face goes blank.
“She’s not here, Burton,” Linh repeats, her voice flat as a frozen lake. “She got a call. An executive recruiter—a headhunter—for one of the big national firms. A rush assignment. A temporary gig, but high-level. Big rush.”
“A gig?” Burton stammers. “Where?”
“She is en route to Manhattan. She’s on the Amtrak now.”
The silence is heavy with the scent of star anise and beef broth. Burton sputters. “When… when is she back?”
Linh shrugs. “End of the week? Maybe. She doesn’t know.”
“Well,” Burton says, the word sounding anemic. “Okay then. I guess I’ll see you later.”
He walks out of the restaurant like a man who has forgotten how his legs work. The sunset nine is dead. The night of bliss is a vapor.
He drives to Granite Hills out of habit, but the sight of the clubhouse makes him nauseous. He thinks about joining a threesome, the forced small talk of “What do you do?” and “Great lie, Bob,” but he can’t face it. He goes to the practice range instead, buys two large buckets of balls, and stands on the mat.
After five swings, he stops. This is pathologically stupid, he thinks. I spend ten hours a day at the office surrounded by golf balls. Why am I doing this for fun? He drops the club, leaves the balls for some lucky teenager, and walks into The Tavern.
He orders a Lee Trevino (an Arnold Palmer with tequila) and downs it in three long gulps. He orders another. Then a steak sandwich with extra fries, which he eats without tasting. He finishes with a Remy Martin on the rocks, the cognac burning a trail of false warmth down his throat. Suddenly, he has a lot on his mind.
By the time he steps back into the night air, he realizes he can’t go back to his condo. The silence there will be deafening. He sits in his car in the parking lot, watching the last vestiges of sunset evaporate. Without consciously deciding to, he finds himself back in North Quincy, pulling into the lot of Pho 475.
The dinner rush is over. Linh is overseeing the closing procedures with quiet efficiency. She doesn’t seem surprised to see him. In fact, she looks as though she’s been expecting him.
“Can I talk to you?” he asks.
“Nine o’clock, doors close.” At nine, she turns off the outside light and locks the door. They sit in her customary booth. The lights have dimmed, but the staff is scurrying, purposefully getting ready for tomorrow.
“I love your daughter, Linh,” Burton blurts out. “I know it sounds fast, but I’ve never met anyone like her. I want to spend the rest of my life with her.”
Linh sits perfectly still. She lets him spew his heart out, lets him offer up his vulnerabilities like raw meat on a plate. When he finally runs out of breath, she leans forward.
“I shouldn’t be the one telling you this,” she says softly. “You are a nice man, Burton. And Quinn… she is very appreciative of the opportunity you gave her at your business. She genuinely likes you.”
“But?” Burton whispers. “She doesn’t want to see me anymore?”
“No, no … only she can answer that. I am just saying you must expect things like this to happen. Quinn is living in the future. People like you and me, we live in the present. And she has a plan. Quinn has a career, a family, a destiny. You and I are minor characters in the life playing out for her. We are the scenery, Burton. Not the leads. Maybe another time, another place.”
Linh maintains her composure. There is no accusation in her voice, yet the rejection is so total and cosmic that Burton feels his reality fracture. “This might be the worst day of my life,” he chokes out.
“You’ll bounce back,” she says. “You’re a strong, decent man. You’ll figure things out.”
“I don’t know … suddenly, I feel like I’m down for the count.”
Linh says nothing. She looks at him levelly. After an eternal silence, she speaks. “Come back same time tomorrow night. I’ll tell you a story.”
The Lucky One
The next night Burton shows up at the stroke of nine. The red neon “Open” sign has been turned off, but the door has not yet been locked. Linh sits in her command booth reviewing a stack of invoices. The overheads have been dimmed, and the air is redolent with the aroma of Pho that has likely been simmering for years. She stops an old man scurrying by with a mop and says something in Vietnamese. Then she looks up at Burton and says. “I just ordered a pot of Jasmine green tea. Would you like anything to eat?”
Burton has been too preoccupied to think about dinner, but he is suddenly hungry. He would love some spring rolls. Linh speaks to the mop man, and he scurries towards the kitchen.
“Did you hear from Quinn today?” she asks.
“A couple of brief texts,” he says. “Sounds like they’ve pushed her into the deep end of the pool and she’s learning how to swim.”
Once they are served, Burton says, between bites, “You promised me a story.” She nods, and without prologue, begins: “In April 1975, the United States pulled its troops from South Vietnam. My family lived in a village thirty miles north of Saigon. It was a farming village of no military importance, that mostly had avoided the worst impacts of the war …”
The story reveals itself as a dream, complete with sounds, smells, and nuance. Her English is nearly perfect, but lacks the comfortable inflection of a mother tongue. You can detect it when she toggles into Vietnamese with a passing staff member. Her delivery is flawless, with the patina of huskiness that only comes with the passage of decades. Burton sips his tea and allows himself to be transported.
Linh tells of her ancestral village, Vinh Dien, which translates to Eternal Field. “It’s fitting, because life revolves around the planting and harvest of rice and the care of water buffalo. But that all changed suddenly.”
In even tones and at a measured pace, Linh tells him how the North Vietnamese Army arrived one day and, without warning, shot her grandfather and set fire to the huts in the village. Her mother, younger sister, and brother fled into the jungle. The next day, however, they are discovered by other soldiers. The brother is kidnapped, presumably to be forced into their army. The sister is raped repeatedly, and then her throat is slit. Linh’s mother, too, is raped, but the soldiers leave abruptly, and she is left alive but traumatized. The next day, her mother encounters scores of people who have experienced similar atrocities and who are making their way towards Saigon.
Burton listens, silent, respectful, and his heart racing as Linh portrays a world where the harmony of millennia is obliterated and negated in a day. He wavers between mesmerized and paralyzed as he tries to reconcile the image of this calm, unflustered woman sitting opposite him in a deserted restaurant, and the violent, visceral mural she creates with her words. He says nothing.
“Enough!” she declares, glancing at the clock on the wall. “Tomorrow I’ll tell you more of the story, but only if you want.” Instinctively, Burton glances at his own watch and is amazed to see that an hour has passed. He finally stammers, “I’m … so … sorry.”
“Nononono …” Linh manages a slight smile and shakes her head. “No … my mother was the lucky one. If you come back tomorrow … another story.” With that, she puts her horrific magic carpet away for the night.
That night, Burton has unsettling dreams of the Dorchester gas tanks exploding, causing liquid gas to flow in the streets. Burton watches in confused horror as local residents slurp the gas from gutters, which makes them drunk and disorderly. He wakes up disoriented and unrested, as if he has survived a dogfight.
He remembers the dream as he passes the tanks that evening on his way to North Quincy. He takes a moment to find the profile of Ho Chi Minh, the one that caused so much rancor. But that was before his time. He will see if his father remembers anything about it the next time they talk. In the twilight, the colors become shades of gray as he passes.
Linh is waiting with tea and spring rolls. She wastes no time on small talk, plunging directly into storytelling mode.
“My mother found refuge in an abandoned government building in Saigon. There were many other women there, all of them suffering from some level of trauma– lost children, burned villages. There’s a woman who appears to be in charge of the chaos. ‘No talk!’ she tells them. ‘No talk!’ Instead, she shows the women how to groom each other. They braid hair, massage shoulders, and paint fingernails with pretend polish. Then they unbraid hair, massage feet, and fake-paint toenails. Then they switch partners and do it again. It’s group therapy to salvage some scrap of humanity. But one day, abruptly, the leader announces they are all leaving. They are trucked down to Saigon’s port district and herded onto rickety boats headed for various destinations.
“They give my mother a choice of boats. Singapore or Indonesia? She does not know one from the other. She gets onto boat for Indonesia, wherever that is.” Linh’s gaze is steady; her voice is level, but the pictures she draws are as vivid as Burton’s dreams.
“Conditions on the boat are horrible. The creaky hull leaks, the heat is suffocating, food and water are non-existent, but this does not prevent it from being attacked by pirates. People are forced to strip naked to prove that no nuggets of gold have been hidden in their waistbands. Then, my mother is raped again.” Many boat people die and are thrown in the ocean, but her boat does make it to Indonesia, where she is herded into Galang Refugee Camp. Years later, she learns it is famous, or notorious, for the appalling conditions. Some time passes, and Linh’s mother learns she is pregnant.
Linh pauses. Another hour has passed. Burton knows instinctively that tonight’s story and the evening have ended. This time he sputters, trying to simultaneously express horror, sympathy, and amazement. She stops him again with “No … She was the lucky one.”
The third night there is no story. Quinn returns from New York and works her regular shift at the restaurant. She comes back with Burton to his condo, but is so exhausted that she falls asleep immediately. The next morning she is reinvigorated and talks non-stop about the excitement and challenge of being in the office of the fast-paced consulting firm. That day Pho-475 is catering a lavish Vietnamese wedding in nearby Wollaston, and Quinn is working a double shift. On Sunday, the consulting firm calls again, sending her on another temporary gig, this time in Atlanta.
On Monday, Pho-475 is closed, but on Tuesday, Burton arrives for part 3 of Linh’s story. She is her usual, elegant, immaculate self, but for the first time, she shows a hint of surprise. “I did not know if you’d be back.”
Burton says, “We haven’t even gotten to America yet.” She smiles and nods towards what he now thinks of as “their booth.”
Linh is born in the internment camp and lives there for the first three years of her life, although she remembers little and can’t really separate her memories from the stories she’s been told. One day they are driven in an open truck to an airfield where they are loaded onto a military transport and flown to the Subic Bay Naval Air Station in the Philippines, then subsequently packed into a bigger transport that flies them, in turn, to Midway, Guam, Hawaii, Anchorage, and eventually Travis Air Force Base in Oakland, California. It is years later that names are attached to the stops on the journey. At the time, it is only the obedient herding of weak people, but of survivors.
Linh’s new home– the first she can really remember– is in a Vietnamese community in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. Her earliest memories are of crawling on a linoleum floor amidst the smell of acetone and acrylic, looking up at her mother and a half-dozen other women giving manicures and pedicures while conversing with each other in their comforting native tongue. When she started school, she spoke almost no English. “I was a ghost. I wore thrift store clothes, and I was afraid to speak, but I saw how the American girls moved and spoke. I did my homework in the back of the salon. By high school I was an American girl, too. I was the lucky one. I was pretty.”
“You certainly are,” thinks Burton, his eyes lingering. That night, unlocking the front door to let him out, Linh gives Burton a quick hug.
The following night, Linh recounts high school in the Tenderloin, learning to live among hippies, bums, and druggies while working in the grooming trade. One night an older man causes a stir when he shows up at the nail parlor. He is about her mother’s age, nice-looking, but balding, and dressed in a business suit. “My mother brought him over to me and said, ‘This is Anh. Anh ấy sẽ là chồng của bạn’ ‘This is your new husband.’ That night I did not feel like the lucky one.”
To make matters worse, Linh learns that her new husband lives on the other side of the country, in Dorchester, where he runs a small, storefront restaurant, Pho-475. She moves to Boston, lives in a three-decker that is home to a total of 39 people, all Vietnamese, and all relatives of Anh. Linh is overwhelmingly sad for the next year, leaving her familiar home, family, and community, but disobedience is not an option within her culture. She works in a nail Salon on Adams Street, helps out at the restaurant, and is in every way the dutiful young bride.
That night her hug is a teeny, tiny bit longer and harder.
She begins the next night on a more positive note. “Maybe I’m the lucky one after all. Anh works very hard, and he is kind. He grabs the opportunity to buy the house we are living in, and he and his relatives begin renovating it. Also, he is a generous man. He flies me back to San Francisco to see my mother and friends every year, and flies her here if she’ll come. She doesn’t like Boston much. Anh is crazy for the Boston Bruins. We watch on a small, black and white television. I have a son, whom we name Robert, after the great Bobby Orr, and then Kwan Sae, who is named after the woman in Saigon who helped my mother.”
“One day Anh is very excited. He says, ‘We’re moving across the river, opening a new restaurant. Fancy restaurant. Strip mall near State Street complex. New house, duplex, with a yard! We’re living the American dream!'” She stops. For once, Burton sees her struggle with emotions. It has been three years since Anh died. He knows the rest of the story from Quinn. Anh renovates the new restaurant while keeping the original open to provide cash flow. One night he closes up and is carrying the cash bag to put in the night depository of a nearby bank when he is shot in the back of the head by a crackhead.
“This is a good place to end tonight’s story,” Burton says. He reaches across the table and squeezes her hand.
The next night Quinn returns from Atlanta. She is beyond buoyant. She glows and bubbles. She loves the work, she loves her colleagues, she even loves the client. But the highlight, she excitedly tells Burton, is that one evening after work she and three co-workers had time for a quick nine holes at a nearby public course. “I held my own, Backswing long and low, but the best part …” she says, “No one believed that only four months ago, I had never held a golf club!” She rewards Burton with a loud smack on the lips.
Later that same night Quinn and Burton are making love at Burton’s condo, when he stops in mid-delicto, his passion and erection leaking away as quickly as the liquid from the Dorchester gas tanks of his dreams. “What’s wrong?” Quinn asks. He mumbles. He’s confused. She’s confused. It’s only weeks later, with the benefit of hindsight, that he realizes that he was falling in love … just not with her.
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