Early Saturday morning before the summer sun peeked over the horizon, Tiffany washed and blow-dried her hair, and then she arrived at her parents’ house only to find her cousins Imani and Asia already in her mother’s kitchen.
Her mom was working on Asia’s hair, her fingers deftly plaiting inch-wide jumbo box braids. After twenty years of doing three girls’ hair every other week, she was quick at it.
Imani stood at the kitchen counter, wearing Tiffany’s mother’s strawberry apron and rolling out pie crust.
“Dang it! I swear, I swear you two are cheating,” Tiffany grumped as she flung her groceries and other shopping bags on the table. “It’s eight-oh-nine! How could you two have gotten here ‘after eight’ and yet you’re already getting braided?”
Imani and Asia smirked, and Tiffany’s own mother tutted at her. “They got up bright and early. Asia walked into the kitchen as the clock struck eight—”
“Because you were sitting outside in your car for fifteen minutes, weren’t you?” Tiffany interrogated Asia, but Asia just sat there smirking and flinching as Tiffany’s mom scraped her hair into tight sections and braided it.
“—and so she’s first,” Tiffany’s mother said over her. “You arrived last, which means you get to—”
“I know, I know,” Tiffany grumbled. “Peel the potatoes.”
Nobody liked to peel the potatoes.
“There’s an eight-pound bag under the sink, so you get to it.” Her mother precisely parted Asia’s fluffy poof of hair using a steel rat-tail comb, sectioning the next area of her scalp into a neat box, and then banding and braiding Asia’s hair as she added in the long hair extensions that would swing past Asia’s shoulders.
Tiffany rolled her eyes, found the bag under the sink, and sat down at the kitchen table to peel eight pounds of potatoes for Saturday family dinner at two. “Who’s all coming?”
“Does it matter?” her mother asked as she yanked Asia’s hair into perfectly plaited braids.
“Just wondering who I’m peeling these potatoes for.” Tiffany got to work.
Tiffany’s mother eyed her as she braided. She’d run a doctor’s medical practice as the business manager for ten years and brooked no arguments from doctors or insurance companies, let alone one of her children or nieces. “Are you going to want those little knobby ponytail holders all over your head again?”
Tiffany said, “No, I bought some flat, gold bands for the ends this time.”
“Mmmm, fancy. You got a wedding you’re going to or something?”
“No, ma’am.”
“It’s just as well. I whacked my knuckles six times putting those balls in. They were cute, though.”
“Did Jericho Parr think they were cute?” Asia asked Tiffany.
Tiffany scowled at her. “How would I know?”
Her mother asked, “Who’s Jericho Parr?”
And dang it. Of course, her mother would pick that up and run with it.
Asia piped up, “He’s the new bag boy at the golf club. Tiffany said he’s hot.”
“I did not.” Tiffany sliced a thick layer of peel off of a potato, and it landed in the growing pile on a paper towel. “I said he was new bag room staff. Latoya Miller told you he was hot. She thinks every guy is hot because she’s sixteen and befuddled with hormones.”
Her mother asked, “Why are you looking at bag boys? They’re all seventeen-year-old children or sixty-year-old dirty old men.”
Tiffany started to say that Jericho wasn’t either one of those, but Imani butted in. “Tiffany said he’s thirty years old and still a bag boy.”
“Oh, dear,” Tiffany’s mom tutted. “That’s too bad.”
Tiffany tried to get a word in edgewise again, but Asia was too fast for her. “And Jordan said he saw you guys playing golf together a couple of days ago.”
“Sweet baby Jesus, the gossip in this town!” Tiffany mangled a potato with the peeler. “I’m not dating him or anything.”
Well, maybe not anything. Wow, Jericho was proficient with that tongue of his.
“Jordan said he saw you guys hitting balls on the range together, too.”
Tiffany glared at her, trying to squelch the line of discussion with intimidation. “Anybody can be on the driving range at any time. It doesn’t mean we were together.”
“He also saw the two of you standing on the back deck, talking.”
“Anybody can stand on the back deck and talk to people. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“And Latoya said she saw him walk you to your car.”
“There is altogether too much gossip in this town. Didn’t Reverend Michael give a sermon just a few weeks ago about the evils of gossip?” Tiffany demanded.
Asia said, “You guys must be paying the bag room staff too much, though. Jericho Parr is staying at the Newcastle Inn and Spa, in one of the suites. He’s had two massages in the last week. Martinique said he has an old shoulder injury and a shredded six-pack of abs. She said he looks like an athlete.”
Now there was an image Tiffany didn’t need in her head. Jericho Parr had been invading her dreams enough as it was without imagining him with a freakin’ six-pack. “Are you spying on him? Because you shouldn’t be spying on him.”
Asia continued, “I’ve seen him a few times because he eats supper in the café every day, and he is fine. I might start delivering his room service breakfast in the morning to get a better look at him. I mean, he is a large chunk of man. Are his eyes blue?”
“Yeah.” Tiffany didn’t look up from her pile of potatoes.
“He’s a white guy?” her mother asked.
“Yeah.” This was all getting very far out of hand.
Asia announced, “Maybe I should get a job at NGC if the bag room staff can afford to stay at the spa and eat their meals in the overpriced café. How much are you paying those guys, anyway?”
“Well, it turns out I made a mistake,” Tiffany said, shooting eye-daggers at the potato in her hand. If cooking wrecked her manicure, she was going to be mad because she’d just gotten a fill the evening before. “It turns out that Jericho Parr isn’t working in the bag room.”
All three of them turned and looked at her. Her mother even paused in her braiding.
Imani asked, “Oh?”
Asia asked, “Did he get fired from NGC already? Is that why he’s a bag boy at thirty years old, because he can’t keep a job?”
“It turns out he never was bag room staff at all.” Tiffany stared at the potato she was peeling like she could laser the skin off if she stared at it hard enough. “It turns out he bought Newcastle Golf Club.”
Much slamming and shouting filled the kitchen.
“He bought the golf course?” Asia asked. “He wrote a check for the golf course like I buy cat food?”
Imani mused, “How rich do you have to be to buy a whole golf course?”
Tiffany ground her teeth and then said, “Our paychecks bounced. The club was insolvent, and they had a fire sale in the middle of the night. Jericho Parr bought it for a steal, and now he’s going to change everything because he wants it to turn a profit.”
Tiffany’s mother frowned. “What will happen to your father’s membership?”
“I don’t know, Momma. That’s the reason why I’m spending some time talking to him, to make sure he doesn’t screw it up. But I’m not dating him.”
Imani cracked up. “A guy who can buy a country club? If you’re not going to date him, I will. You tell Jericho Parr that you’ve got a cousin who wants to meet him.”
Tiffany ground her teeth again. That would never, ever happen. Never.
She shook her head. That thought had not needed so much venom. Everything about this conversation was ridiculous, and she needed to give it all up to Jesus.
Her mother shook her head. “‘It is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven,’” she quoted. Robin Jones had run Sunday School, Wednesday Bible study, and Saturday Witness at their Methodist church for twenty years on and off, whenever they’d lived in Newcastle. If she would’ve entered the military, she would have outranked Tiffany’s father within ten years. Mrs. Jones was a pillar of the Newcastle community, and she knew the importance of such social pillars in Newcastle. “Tiffany, I don’t think you should spend so much time with this man.”
Tiffany huffed, “I told you I’m not dating him, so we don’t need to talk any more about him. Asia, how are things going with Scott?”
Imani shouted, “Asia finally broke up with Scott! She caught him with his side chick at the spa’s café when she was waitressing one morning!”
Chaos ensued.
And it successfully diverted the conversation from Jericho Parr.
Tiffany sighed in relief and peeled the next seven pounds of potatoes until she finally got her turn with her own mother to get her hair braided.