“EXCUSE ME.”
It seemed as though those were the only words Sara had spoken since arriving in West Palm Beach. They had been deposited the night before in a small condo near the seventeenth tee with a golf cart and a basket of fruit. Having eaten on the plane (a ridiculously delicious meal of lobster and chopped romaine salad) and arrived in Florida after eleven, the Barlows and the Livingstons had parted ways until their planned meet-up on the first tee the next morning. The morning that was now here.
“Which way to the clubhouse?” Nick asked, calling out to a slightly frail man walking up the sixteenth fairway.
“The clubhouse? Of the Wilshire Country Club?” He asked the question rhetorically, though it somehow seemed he would never believe the answer.
“Yes. The Wilshire Country Club.” Where else would it be? The small community was gated and guarded.
Sitting in their golf cart, dressed for golf but without any clubs because they didn’t actually own any, Nick and Sara were sitting targets.
“Follow the cart path back to the tenth hole. You can pick up a scorecard in the little green box near the ball-washer. There’s a map on the back.” The man walked away, satisfied with his answer and eager to move on to see where his ball had landed up ahead, leaving Nick and Sara in the middle of the long, perfectly groomed stretch of grass.
“There . . . ,” Sara said, pointing to a small paved path several yards in front of them.
Nick had started to drive, when he heard someone call out.
“Hello?” It was a woman, equal in age to the man but nowhere near as frail. She appeared from behind a small cluster of pine trees, and as she approached them, she wiped some mud from her ball then tossed it over her shoulder into the fairway.
Nick shrugged at Sara, who shrugged back. Not sure what to do, they drove over to the woman who had called out to them.
“Hello,” Nick said, smiling.
The woman scrutinized them from behind a pair of oversized sunglasses. “Who are you?” she asked.
Through a look of utter bewilderment at such a question, and even more so the manner in which it was asked, Sara wondered if this was some kind of joke.
Nick elbowed her lightly in the ribs. “Nick and Sara Livingston,” he answered cheerfully, hopping out of the cart. He extended his hand, but the gesture was not reciprocated.
“I don’t understand,” was all she said back.
“We’re guests of the Barlows,” Nick explained further. “We’re staying just over there,” he said, pointing at the condo. “We were trying to find our way to the clubhouse.”
The woman maintained her quizzical expression as though everything he had just said was completely and utterly absurd. “The Barlows?” she asked.
“Yes,” Nick answered.
The woman eyed Sara once more then turned back to Nick. “You’re not supposed to take the carts on the fairway. It rained last night,” she said as she looked at the ground and squished her gold cleats into the grass. “Can’t you feel how spongy the grass is?”
Nick tried to look horrified. “Oh, we are so sorry. We’ll get right over to the cart path.”
But that was not enough. She looked over the situation again, searching for something.
“Gladys!” The man was yelling now from up ahead, but his wife ignored him completely.
Sighing with what appeared to be disappointment, she seemed ready to let them pass. Then she perked up a bit. “Your shirt!” she called over to Sara. “There’s no collar!”
Sara squished her chin to her chest to get a better look at her shirt. Seeing nothing wrong with it, she pulled it out a bit at the waist and examined it further before looking back at the woman. “Excuse me? My shirt?” It was a V-neck tee with light-blue stripes, freshly ironed and tucked into her khaki shorts. It had taken her nearly an hour to dig the clothes from her summer things, and to her mind she looked about as appropriate as she knew how.
The woman shook her head with disgust as she looked at Nick. “Please tell your young friend that she must wear a collared shirt on the golf course.”
“Actually, she’s my wife. And we will be sure to get her a shirt at the pro shop. Thank you for informing us. We are so grateful—what an embarrassment it might have been!”
The woman tilted her head and sighed some more. “You’re welcome.”
Then she stood with her arms crossed until Nick realized this was his signal to pass. Taking advantage before the opportunity was lost over some other transgression against golf, he scurried back to the cart and drove it slowly toward the cart path.
When they were safely out of range, he burst out laughing.
But Sara couldn’t find it in her to join him. “Who the hell does she think she is?”
“Oh, come on. She’s just some old bat with nothing better to do. We probably made her day—she’ll be talking about us to her friends at the West Palm Beach Assisted Living Mansion. Those wretched youngsters tearing up the fairway—and without a collared shirt!”
Looking out at the magnificent landscape, the bright green grass, palm trees, and blue ocean in the near distance, Sara felt exactly the same way she had at the Barlows’ Halloween bash—immersed in luxury and unable to find in it the slightest bit of pleasure.
“Why would she treat us like that? Do we look like trash to her? Would she have done that to the Ridleys or the Halsteads? What the hell did we do to her?”
Reining himself in, Nick placed his hand on his wife’s knee. “You’re right. She had no business treating us that way. I’m sorry it upset you so much,” he said. And then he drove to the tenth tee, where he found the small green box by the ball-washer with the scorecards inside with the map on the back. They were at the clubhouse five minutes later, where they found the Barlows, dressed to perfection in collared shirts.
“Good morning!” Barlow said as they drove up. “Park it right next to ours.” Decked out in loud plaid shorts and an Arnold Palmer cap, he was smoking a cigar and smiling as he pointed toward a custom six-seater situated by the first tee.
“How was the condo? Everything okay?”
Nick parked the cart, then hopped out to shake Barlow’s hand. “Perfect. What a place this is! I didn’t appreciate it in the dark. The views are incredible.”
“It’s all right if you’re into that sort of thing. You know, natural beauty, sunshine,” he joked. But only he and Nick were smiling.
This had Barlow curious. “Sara—how are you feeling this morning?”
She smiled then, but it was not genuine.
And Barlow had to know why. “All right, let’s have it.”
Sara looked at him, then looked down, suddenly embarrassed that her mood was now infecting everyone around her. Nick jumped in to save her, or maybe to save both of them. “We ran into a very informed woman on the drive over who reminded us that Sara’s shirt is lacking a collar.”
Barlow’s face became flushed with anger. “Don’t tell me,” he said, glancing up at his wife, who was schmoozing the second chair of the membership committee. “White sunhat—shaped like a bonnet. Enormous buglike sunglasses. Face like an alligator and mean as hell?”
Nick looked at Sara, and they both shrugged, neither of them willing to agree or disagree before they knew what they were dealing with. For all they knew, the woman could have been Barlow’s mother.
Sensing their discomfort at being put on the spot, Barlow waved his hand like he was shooing a fly. “Mrs. Plevin. I’m so sorry. What a way to be introduced to the club. Christ! But tell me this—was she coming out of the woods?”
Nick nodded. “How did you know?”
Just then, Rosalyn walked over to join them, her tasseled golf shoes clicking against the pavement.
“Rosalyn,” Barlow called out to her. “They had a little run-in with Mrs. Plevin. She was coming out of the woods.”
“No—it was nothing, really,” Nick interjected, trying to play down the whole incident. But Barlow seemed to be enjoying himself.
“Good God. Not again!” Rosalyn said, smiling appropriately. “That woman is shameless.”
Nick was now confused. “I don’t understand.”
“You explain it to Nick, and I’ll take Sara to the pro shop for a new shirt,” Barlow said, and this seemed to please his wife in a perverse sort of way that made him uneasy. Still, the tee time was looming, and there was a shirt to hunt down.
Rosalyn took Nick’s arm. “Come on. I’ll explain it while we get the demos loaded up.”
Doing as she was told, Sara followed Barlow’s lead up a short hill to the pro shop. In spite of everything that had gone on—Mrs. Plevin, this whole trip, and the awkwardness that had inserted itself into her marriage—she was relieved to be alone with Ernest Barlow again. His humor had a way of reaching her, most likely because it came from the place she had been finding herself in lately, a cynical and unforgiving disdain for the world she inhabited. Of course, it was more Barlow’s world than hers, and this made him all the more interesting to her.
When they reached the small patio near the snack bar, Barlow stopped and turned to face her. “The Plevins are in the early-bird tournament. See that scoreboard?”
Sara’s eyes followed Barlow’s to a large white posterboard propped upon an easel.
“I see it.”
“The Plevins—” He paused then to take a long drag on the cigar. “—the Plevins like to win. And Mrs. Plevin likes to cheat. This isn’t the first time someone’s caught her tossing her ball out of the woods and onto the fairway.”
Trying to understand what all of this meant, Sara watched Barlow’s face as it took on a mischievous flair. “So this woman—Mrs. Plevin—was trying to humiliate us into keeping quiet? Are you serious?”
Barlow nodded, delighted that his new friend was seeing just how ridiculous country club culture could be. “Well,” he said, his voice ominous. “You have to understand. There’s a filet mignon dinner at stake here. The winning couple eats for free tonight, assuming they don’t object to the slaughtering of cows.”
Sara smiled, this time spontaneously. “Somehow I doubt Mrs. Plevin cares about cows. But, hey . . . a steak dinner. I guess that makes it all okay. Steak dinners are expensive.”
“Yes,” Barlow agreed. “And with a net worth of over three hundred mil . . . well, you can certainly understand how important it is that they win.”
She laughed then as Barlow flicked a large ash to the ground, nodding his head with amusement. It had been a long time since someone had been able to read his dark thoughts so quickly, so silently. And he wondered if that’s what it took, a person still young, still removed enough from their life to be able to see things with a modicum of objectivity.
He let out a long sigh as his eyes lingered on her face. “Come, madam,” he said, already feeling sad that the moment had to be cut short by their approaching tee time. “Let’s get you a collared shirt, and with it, a golden pass to do anything you please at the Wilshire Country Club.”
Sara gave him a quizzical smile. “Even cheat on the golf course?”
“Yes. You could practically fornicate on the eighteenth green—as long as you left your shirt on. Your collared shirt.”
Sara found this hysterical. “Okay, now that is not an image I wanted in my head.”
They laughed then, like two little children making potty talk on the playground, and it was, for both of them, nothing short of liberating. Sara let it fill her up, let it replace the judgments she had begun to weigh against herself. And yet she knew there would be a price to pay for this moment of pleasure, like the hangover after a night of martinis. Somewhere inside her, she could feel that it was all wrong—her rapidly forming bond with Barlow, and Barlow himself. But she could also feel the smile across her face, the one Nick had not been able to inspire. And for now, a smile was what she needed most.