Coralee hits like she’s trying to make it to the moon. Her ball flies off the rocks and back down the green. One time she has to chase it into the parking lot. Bert is worse. He’s so precise, it takes him five minutes to line up a shot. But he almost always gets it in the hole in two or three swings.

By the fifth hole they both stand back and watch when I roll up to tee off.

What I did not tell them when we pulled up is that I have been playing miniature golf since I was three. Mom and I went to the fun park out near the mall all the time in the summer. While the other kids ran off to the go-karts and the bumper cars and the arcade, I stayed with Mom on the greens.

And so now, after nine years of practice, I can line up, lean over, hit the ball one-handed… and get a hole in one almost every time.

Mini golf is my jam.

“You’re like a golf goddess,” Coralee says when I hit one over the water and through the Grand Canyon to the hole on the other side. My hands are freezing and I can’t really feel the club, but I nod.

“Yes. Yes I am.”

It’s getting darker now, and I think of the other kids heading off to the dance and feel sorry for them.

“Did you know that seven men died in the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929?”

“Bert, jeez! Filter, remember? You’re up, anyway,” Coralee says.

He lines up his shot for three minutes and then finally swings, but misses the hole that is just to the left of a wooden cactus. It’s only by half an inch. But a miss is a miss. He takes out his scorecard, makes a note, and then walks forward. He’s still talking when he steps up and taps his ball in. “Well, did you know that Saint Valentine was a priest who was martyred and buried on February fourteenth in a city near Rome?”

“Bert.” I poke him in the shoulder with my club.

“My point is, you two, that miniature golf is a much more appropriate pastime for Valentine’s Day than a dance or date or dinner. Romance has no place on this holiday.”

“Except dinner sounds good now.” I wipe my nose on my sleeve.

“Okay,” Coralee says, “this is the last hole. Then dinner.”