Best You Can Do

Fewthistle

"Eight ball in the left side pocket," the shooter called the final shot.

The black and white ball careened across the green felt, ricocheted off the right side bumper and sped back across the table, dropping with a satisfying 'clunk' into the designated hole. Lennie grinned proudly as he reached into the pocket of his green plaid jacket and retrieved two twenties, tossing them carelessly on the edge of the table.

"Not bad, kid," Briscoe pronounced sagely, "although you had a little bit too much spin on that last shot."

"It went in, didn't it?"

"Yeah, but it was more luck than skill," Lennie commented, his voice carrying the knowledge of over sixty hard lived years in every syllable.

"You're the one who taught me that shot," the shooter complained, dropping in a few quarters and bending to gather the hard multi-colored spheres and rack them up in the faded rubber triangle.

"I taught you all the shots. You said you'd never played. I figured, what the hell," Lennie replied reflectively, leaning back against the smoke stained wall of the tavern, his pool cue held so casually that it seemed a natural extension of his hand.

"You miss her a lot, don't you? That's why you offered to teach me pool?" The cue slid back smoothly through slender fingers, launching forward gracefully to send the white ball sailing across the felt, like a schooner across a green sea, hitting the collected stack of balls with a resounding whack.

"Sometimes so much it feels like somebody sucker punched me in the gut," Briscoe admitted, watching as a few of the spinning orbs made their way into one of the six mesh pockets, memories of his daughter flashing across his mind like old lined stills on a movie screen. "Call 'em."

"Stripes."

"One of these days, you could take solids just for variety, you know?" Lennie chuckled, still surprised at the easy familiarity that had grown between them over the past few months.

"Does it help, spending your free time teaching me to play pool?" Serena asked gently, not looking up as she lined up her next shot.

"It doesn't hurt, kid, it sure as hell doesn't hurt," Lennie answered, a slight smile just touching his lips as he watched his protégée send a spinning sphere of red and white hurtling toward oblivion.

Sometimes not making it worse was the best you could do.