The following afternoon, Jericho parked his Jaguar in front of Tiffany’s parents’ house.
He’d already gone to her apartment and knocked on her door. Her neighbor had come out and told him that Tiffany was still recovering from her surgery at her parents’ place.
He grabbed the bouquet of two dozen red roses from the passenger seat and stepped out of his car.
The small house perched in the center of an immaculately mowed and edged yard covered with healthy grass that had absolutely no bald patches. It so reminded Jericho of a fairway that he wouldn’t have been surprised to find a professional greenskeeper lived there. Old-growth trees towered in the yard, and a wooden swing that had been freshly painted white hung from one of the branches. The house itself was snowy white with blue trim like a cottage on a Wedgewood porcelain plate. The house and yard were so pristine that it probably increased the property values of the surrounding houses, though the other houses held their own in the suburban yard wars. The neighborhood seemed to be one of those where the state of your yard correlated with the perceived state of your immortal soul.
The wooden steps up to the porch were solid under Jericho’s feet, and he rang the doorbell.
An older Black man opened the door. Silver smudged his hair around his temples and in his trimmed beard. He was nearly as tall as Jericho and had the lean, muscular build of a man who’d commanded raw recruits and kept up with eighteen-year-olds on ten-mile runs most of his career.
He looked Jericho up and down and, without taking his obsidian eyes off of him, called back into the house, “Robin! A gentleman is here for you.”
Jericho rushed as he said, “I was told this is where Tiffany Jones’s parents live, and she’s staying here.”
The man’s gaze became sharper as he went in for the kill. “No, you must be here for my wife, because there’s no way on God’s green Earth you’re here for my daughter.”
He might as well have tricked Jericho into picking up a golf ball with the word GOTCHA scrawled on it.
Jericho grinned what he prayed was a winning smile in the face of death. “I can see where Tiffany gets her wicked sense of humor.”
That quip earned Jericho a steely-eyed, unblinking stare.
After a few heartbeats of standing on the porch with a rigor mortis grin on his face while the July heat clung to the dress slacks and white shirt he wore with the sleeves rolled up, Jericho lifted the flowers slightly. “May I speak with Tiffany?”
Tiffany’s feminine voice, dainty and beautiful as always, hollered from inside, “Tell that jerk to go away and I never want to see him again!”
Her father turned back to Jericho, never breaking eye contact, his broad shoulders blocking the doorway. “Miss Tiffany Jones declines to speak to you.”
“We had a misunderstanding,” Jericho explained.
“That’s none of my business.”
“And she doesn’t understand what happened.”
“And that is also none of my business.” Her father spoke with that clipped, perfunctory cadence typical to military personnel, as staccato as marching an eighteen-inch step.
“If I could just talk to her—”
From behind him, Tiffany yelled, “Tell him I’m not here!”
“I’m sorry,” her dad said to Jericho, “but Miss Tiffany Jones is not in at the present time.”
Jericho gestured to the house with his bouquet. “But I just heard her!”
Her father enunciated, speaking more slowly and deliberately. “I said, Miss Tiffany Jones is not in.”
“If I could just explain to her—”
“There is nothing for you to explain. I trust my daughter’s reasoning.”
“I just—” There was nothing Jericho could do, so he held out the flowers to her father. “If you would give these to her the next time you see her, I would appreciate it.”
Her father nodded and accepted the red roses. His forearm bulged when he gripped the stems, and Jericho prayed the florist had adequately removed the thorns. He said, “I will give the flowers to my daughter when she is in.”
“What flowers?” Tiffany called from inside the house.
Her father spun in the doorway, letting the roses dangle beside his leg. “I did not raise my daughter to be so easily bribed with plants!”
“No, what kind of flowers are they? Are they red roses?”
“Yes, it’s more red roses!” he yelled back into the house.
“ . . . Ask him if he was sending the roses this whole time.”
Jericho started to answer, but her father turned back to him and held one finger up, asking, “Miss Tiffany Jones would like to know if you sent her red roses at the rate of one bouquet per week for the last six weeks.”
Jericho admitted, “Yes, that was me.”
Her father relayed this information inside the house.
Tiffany’s yell was quieter when she said, “Okay, let him in.”
Her father slammed the roses against Jericho’s chest, scowling as he said, “You can give these to her yourself.” Jericho caught the flowers before they fell while Tiffany’s father turned sharply with an about-face and marched inside the house.
Jericho followed, quietly and meekly. This was not an auspicious way to meet Tiffany’s parents.
In the living room, Tiffany stood beside a slightly older and slimmer version of herself, except that the other woman’s hair was coiled back in an elegant twist instead of braided.
Tiffany leaned on crutches and stood beside her mother. She wore shorts, so her long knee brace was visible, something she’d never done at the club.
Even though Tiffany was glaring at him, Jericho was just so damn glad to see her. He hadn’t seen her at all since her surgery weeks before, and he took three steps toward her, his arms opening before he caught himself and merely offered her the roses, saying, “I’m sorry.”
Tiffany’s mother and father shifted and looked at each other. Jericho wasn’t sure whether they were pleased that he had apologized or were upset that he’d done something he needed to apologize for.
Tiffany took the flowers, still leaning on the crutches, and laid them on an end table. “Mom and Dad, this is Jericho Parr, the person who purchased Newcastle Golf Club and has been gentrifying it.” Her parents glared harder at him. Tiffany continued, “Jericho, may I introduce my parents, Master Sergeant Sherman Jones and Mrs. Robin Jones.”
Yes, Tiffany had mentioned more than once that her father had been in the Marines.
Jericho turned to her mother first because she was closer. “It’s nice to meet you, Robin.”
Her mother’s eyebrows raised, and her voice lowered. “You may call me Mrs. Jones.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Jericho knew not to make the same mistake twice. He turned to Tiffany’s father. “And it’s an honor to meet you, sir.”
Her father’s scowl deepened. “Don’t call me sir. I work for a living. It’s Master Sergeant Jones.”
“Yes, um—”
“Master Sergeant.”
“Yes, Master Sergeant,” Jericho said, feeling chastised but not knowing exactly why. “Thank you for your service.”
Mrs. Jones invited Jericho to sit on a chair while Tiffany’s parents flanked her on the couch. Her parents were still glaring at him.
Jericho cleared his throat. “It seems there’s been a misunderstanding.”
From somewhere in the back of the house, a door slammed, and female voices called from back there.
“Sis!”
“Bestie!”
“Where are you?”
Two more women who bore a familial resemblance to Tiffany and her mother came into the living room.
One of them was Asia, the room service waitstaff who delivered Jericho’s breakfast on most mornings at the Newcastle Inn and Spa.
Asia piped up, “Oh, hi there, Mr. Parr. What are you doing here?” Her eyes drew a line from Jericho to Tiffany and Tiffany’s two angry parents. “I knew it. I knew it! That was too much breakfast for one person that I was bringing you every day.”
Master Sergeant Isaac Jones sprang from his seat. “What!”
Tiffany whacked him on the leg with the back of her hand. “Sit, Daddy. That is none of your business.”
He sat, but his scowl at Jericho had turned into an active snarl.
Tiffany said to Jericho, “These are two of my cousins, Asia and Imani.”
Jericho folded his hands and remained very still. “I was hoping we could talk alone.”
“Anything you have to say to me, you can say in front of my family. So, what are you here about?”
Nerves began to rattle in the back of Jericho’s head. “I wanted to explain to you why I had to make the changes I did to Newcastle Country Club.”
“I can’t believe you changed the name. It sounds so stuck-up now,” she said.
“It was important for me to increase the value of the club as much as I could by the end of the calendar year.”
Tiffany frowned at him. “Why? Do you need it for collateral for a loan or something?”
The rattle in the back of his head was getting worse. “There was a bet.”
Tiffany stared at him. “You destroyed Newcastle Golf Club over a bet?”
Her mother clicked her tongue. “Gambling.”
“It wasn’t just any wager,” Jericho tried to explain. “It was a bet between me and three friends of mine against this other guy, Gabriel Fish. We call him The Shark. We all have to buy one golf-related business, and the person who increases the value of their property the most wins. So essentially, it’s the four of us against The Shark, because if any of us win, then we don’t have to pay off the other guys. But if all four of us lose and Gabriel wins, it’ll destroy the business we’ve built up over the last five years. We’ll have to liquidate everything to pay it off.”
“How much did you bet?” Tiffany asked, squinting at him.
Jericho swallowed. “A hundred million dollars each.”
Tiffany and her family reared back and dodged around like a herd of attacking bats had swept through the room and slapped them with their wings.
Tiffany asked Jericho, “Are you crazy? You bet a hundred million dollars on anything?”
Jericho shrugged. “It was New Year’s Eve. We were drunk.”
Tiffany’s cousins gasped and looked at each other and then around the room and ceiling as if they were trying to find the source of such a sacrilegious thing that had been uttered in such a God-fearing home.
Tiffany shook her head at Jericho. “Jeez, you could’ve said anything but that.”
Master Sergeant Jones stood up again, but he gestured to his family instead of yelling at Jericho. “Alcohol. This man drinks alcohol.” He leaned down to Tiffany. “You have brought a man who drinks alcohol into our house.”
Tiffany rolled her eyes and tugged on her father’s hand, and he sat back down.
Mrs. Jones’s lips were pressed so tightly together that her jaw bulged at the sides, but she parted them slightly to hiss, “‘Neither thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor gamblers will inherit the kingdom of God.’”
“It doesn’t matter how it happened,” Jericho said, although evidently, it did. “What matters is that there was a signed contract, and if one of us doesn’t win, we’re going to owe Gabriel Fish four hundred million dollars. I have to do my part. I was the first one to find a good property and buy it, which means I have fairly good odds of winning this thing and saving Last Chance, Inc. I can’t throw away this opportunity to save my company, thousands of jobs, and my friends’ life savings for one golf course’s perceived stature in a small New England town.”
Tiffany shook her head sadly. “You think it’s just any old golf course in some random town in upstate Connecticut, but our community is all we have. My dad served his country. My mother has worked her butt off to build the First United Methodist Church into the thriving community it is today. She runs the church’s food pantry and the minister’s fund, all while working full time and putting the fear of God into any insurance company that tries to stick one of her doctors’ patients with the bill. Whenever there’s a problem in Newcastle, my parents handle it. They’re pillars of this community like NGC was.”
Jericho said, “NGC was insolvent. It had already failed. Your paycheck bounced before I came in and covered it, and I rescued that golf course. If I hadn’t bought it, the fairways would be overgrown with weeds by now, and it would be just another derelict property in this town. NFA’s golf team wouldn’t have anywhere to practice at all.”
“You saved it, but then you ruined it,” she said.
“At least I kept it going, and I’m improving it.”
“This is my community, Jericho. I’ve tried to explain to you what that means to us. When I was growing up and trying to get a scholarship, my high school and NGC and Coach Kowalski helped me. I couldn’t have done any of this without their help. These kids right now that are trying to succeed, Newcastle Golf Club is supposed to help them. That’s what you destroyed. You didn’t just make a clubhouse bigger and a driving range longer. You didn’t just bring in new clientele. You ripped NGC out of the community that it was sustaining. Regular families won’t be able to afford memberships anymore. Kids won’t ever start golf now, and they won’t get college scholarships, and they’ll continue to be mired in a life of living paycheck-to-paycheck and praying there’s enough money at the end of the month. People’s lives are precarious, and there’s one less pillar holding us up now.”
Jericho shook his head. “The other three Last Chance guys—Mitchell, Morrissey, and Kingston—are my family. The three of us arrived at boarding school in Switzerland with no one and nothing, and we banded together. We’re closer than brothers. I can’t throw them to the wolves or The Shark. I couldn’t have done anything differently,” he told her.
“I know, and neither can I. I’ll be leaving for TSU in a few days to attend an intensive summer program with Coach Robinson because there’s nothing left for me here. I’ve already confirmed with her that I’ll be there for practice next Monday morning. Please leave, Jericho. I don’t think we have anything else to say to each other.”
And so, he did.
Jericho left the house, got into his car, and drove back to NCC, where he stared at spreadsheets that were still bleeding red for several more hours, even though he didn’t comprehend anything he was looking at.
He hadn’t had a choice. Newcastle Golf Club had been insolvent, and he’d swooped in and bought it when it was going under for the third time.
He had a moral obligation to Mitchell, Morrissey, and Kingston to try to win the bet so they wouldn’t be wiped out.
So why did he feel like shit?