Tiffany hated physical therapy.
Everyone hates doing physical therapy after orthopedic surgery, so Tiffany felt perfectly justified in truly loathing it.
She did not, however, slack off in the slightest. On the contrary, she completed every exercise at every session to the absolute limit of her ability and asked the physical therapist what else she should be doing every time.
After two weeks, Dr. Cooper declared the surgery a success and suggested Tiffany might have an exceptional recovery, which meant that professional-level sports were within the realm of possibility for Tiffany again.
Her mother was with her for the checkup, and as soon as Dr. Cooper left the room, Tiffany burst into tears, and then her mother did, too.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t think I’d ever hear that,” Tiffany said to her mom.
“I have been praying for a miracle for you ever since you stepped on that damn rock and hurt your knee,” her mother said, wiping tears off her face. “All those doctors and specialists and surgeons we took you to, and no one would touch your knee. It has killed me to see you so angry and sad every day working at Newcastle Golf Club where you grew up instead of playing on the LPGA tour where you were meant to be. You should call Coach Robinson and see if there’s any chance she could help you apply for the LPGA qualifying tournament or anything through TSU.”
Tiffany’s heart clenched like a fist and she wanted to say no, but that didn’t make any sense. She’d always wanted to be a professional golfer. Her father had taken her to the golf course ever since she was five years old because she wanted to be a professional golfer.
So Tiffany called Coach Robinson, who had many ideas that might get Tiffany back on the track to playing professional golf on the LPGA Tour. “You should come down to TSU for the second half of the summer,” Coach Robinson said. “The Tennessee State University golf team is holding a minicamp because we have several juniors who have excellent shots at going pro after next year, and three more younger girls coming up in the ranks who might turn pro, too. It would be an intensive environment where you could polish your skills to start playing on a women’s junior tour next fall. If you win three times there, you’ll be moved up to the LPGA. I’ll bet it wouldn’t take you more than a year to be called up.”
Again, Tiffany’s heart squeezed, and she wondered if one of the anti-inflammatory drugs was giving her a heart attack. Impending doom descended over her at the thought of leaving Newcastle and touring the country alone for the rest of her professional career, which was exactly how Aunt Delilah had described the only symptom of her heart attack. Coronary symptoms were different in women than men, Aunt D had told them, and sometimes different in Black folks, too.
Yep, this sense of foreboding darkness must be a heart attack. It couldn’t be anything else.
“Thank you, Coach Robinson. I’ll think about it.”
Her mother was aghast. “Why wouldn’t you take Coach Robinson up on her offer? That was so generous of her!”
But Tiffany couldn’t explain.
After only five weeks post-surgery, Dr. Cooper cleared Tiffany to go back to teaching golf at NGC just after the fourth of July, although she still had to wear her brace for another few weeks. He also said that she wouldn’t be ready for a professional development camp like TSU for another week or two, and he wanted to see her at least once more before she left.
If she left.
She and Jericho had texted back and forth a few times since her surgery, but her parents always seemed to be leaning over her shoulder when she had her phone. If she’d been giggling and texting constantly, they would have suspected something was up. When she’d been in high school, they always seemed to know when Tiffany had a boyfriend before she did.
Besides, May was over. Heck, June was over.
Jericho’s texts had probably dwindled because he had already moved on to Miss June, and by now Miss July, whoever she was.
During her recovery, Coach Kowalski and NGC had sent over get-well-soon gifts.
The first, Tiffany was absolutely sure that Coach Kowalski had picked out. The huge Harry and David gift basket overflowed with pears, strawberries, and Moose Munch. It’d taken her whole family a week to eat it.
The next arrival was an enormous bouquet of red roses, two dozen perfect blooms in a giant porcelain vase, and the card was signed Best, Newcastle Golf Club.
More bouquets arrived at the rate of one per week, always two dozen red roses and always signed Best, Newcastle Golf Club.
Those were not from Coach Kowalski, but Jericho didn’t bring it up so she didn’t either.
And then one day, after too many strenuous PT sessions and months of lying on her parents’ couch watching TV, Tiffany pulled back into the parking lot at NGC and parked her rust-bucket over on the side toward the back of the staff parking area.
Cars packed the parking lot. At first, Tiffany thought an outing or wedding must have booked the club, but she’d checked before she’d left home. Nothing was scheduled on the staff calendar.
The cars filling up the parking lot were all unfamiliar, too. Before, members had driven late-model pickups and mini-SUVs, but so many Jaguars were lined up that Jericho’s Jag didn’t look like a prom rental in the parking lot.
Was that red, low wedge a Lamborghini?
Then she saw the crane towering above the clubhouse, but the backhoes, pickup trucks, and construction dumpsters would have tipped her off as to what was going on even without that.
Everything was torn up.
Half of the clubhouse had been demolished, and an enormous pit had been dug into the black and red-streaked soil beside it. When Tiffany made her way over to the fluttering orange fence, cement filled the bottom, a new foundation for a large building.
Past the clubhouse, construction equipment had driven onto the golf course. A backhoe was excavating a sand trap to enlarge it, while a dump truck waited to refill it with sand.
She hobbled along the fence, looking behind the clubhouse. The practice putting green was mutilated, half of it gone like a grenade had blown it to Hell.
Tiffany spun around, nearly losing her balance and ending up on the ground. She caught herself with one crutch jammed under her armpit. On the other side of the road, the driving range was closed, and bulldozers were flattening the old-growth trees at the far end. The safety fences were down, and the range’s sod was ripped up in circles, exposing the raw earth below.
Tiffany scrambled for her pockets and found her phone. She dialed her dad’s number and slapped it against her face because she needed information first. When he answered, she yelled at her father, “Dad! What the hell is going on at NGC?”
“Language!” her father barked.
“Okay, fine, what in the heck is going on at NGC? I’m standing here in the parking lot, and there’s construction equipment all over the place. It looks like they dug a basement for something.”
“Yeah, that’s for the new locker rooms.”
“The old locker rooms were fine!”
“Not according to the meathead who bought the place. They’re putting in new locker rooms and enlarging the dining room to host larger events, and they had to raise the monthly dues to do it. That’s why I resigned my membership.”
Tiffany slapped her forehead because Jericho wasn’t standing there so she could punch him in the head. “You did what!”
“Well, the dues were getting hefty for someone on a retired NCO’s income, so I thought I would buy an annual pass out at the Kent Municipal Course.”
“But Kent Muni is twenty miles away!”
“Yeah, I probably won’t play as much.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this was going on?”
“Well, you’d just had surgery, and we decided we didn’t want to upset you.”
“Upset me! When did you ever worry about upsetting me? It would have been just another toughening-up experience.”
“Tiffany, you do not talk to me that way.”
“Sorry, Dad. I don’t mean it. I’m just very upset about what is happening to NGC. How much did the dues go up?”
He told her.
“That’s insane. Jericho Parr has lost his mind. I’ll fix this, Dad. Don’t join up at Kent Muni yet. I’ll fix this.”
She called Coach Kowalski, the head golf pro. “What is Parr doing to NGC?”
“Now, Tiffany, we didn’t want to upset you when you just had surgery—”
“I am not a pampered poodle. I am a Marine’s daughter and a Division I athlete. What the hell is going on here?”
“Well, Mr. Parr needed to make some changes.”
“And did you push back? Did you explain to him how important NGC is to the community?”
“He made some good points.”
She gestured at the construction equipment tearing the clubhouse apart. “I don’t see any good points here.”
“Well, there’s that new housing development over on the other side of Newcastle. When I went over there and did a presentation about the improvements Mr. Parr was putting in, we got fifty new members in one weekend, and at the new fee schedule, too. As a matter of fact, within a few weeks, our membership roster was full. Newcastle Country Club has a waiting list for the first time that I can remember.”
“Country club? Newcastle Country Club? But what about the NFA golf team? What about the clinics we put on for the kids in the neighborhood to get them started on golf?”
“Well, some things had to go.”
A backhoe whined and crashed down on a line of shrubs that broke the wind near the practice green. “Go? The high school golf team that wins the state tournament every year? The high school golf team that has sent more kids to college on scholarship than NFA’s football, basketball, and baseball teams combined? That’s what had to go?”
“For Newcastle Country Club to move up to the next level, some things had to change. With all the new members, pro shop revenues have quintupled.”
Tiffany began to understand, and she did not like what she was understanding. “And as head pro, you get a cut of the pro shop’s gross revenues.”
“Yeah, like I always have. Like most pros do. And now I’m making a hell of a lot more money. That’s not a bad thing.”
Tiffany hung up on Kowalski. She dialed her phone again, leaning on one crutch and counting the rings until the traitor answered.
“Tiffany?” Jericho’s deep voice asked. “How are you feeling? I hadn’t heard from you, and I thought—”
Tiffany screamed through her phone, something she had never, ever done in her entire life. “What the hell is going on here?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t—”
She yelled over the roaring scrape of a bulldozer shoving a mound of earth, the lamentations of a cement mixer, and rage roaring in her head. “I’m here! I’m at NGC! There’s construction equipment all over the place! My dad said you tripled the membership fees. You said you weren’t going to ruin it!”
“I’m improving—”
“You’re destroying it! Tripling the fees means normal kids won’t be able to come here and learn to golf. They won’t be able to come here and slam balls for hours on end. Their parents won’t be able to drop off a ten-year-old at seven in the morning and pick them up at seven at night during the summer while they go to work so the kid can play fifty-four holes of golf every day and get good enough to win a college scholarship. It means there won’t ever be any kids on the PGA or LPGA Tours who got their start here at Newcastle Golf Club. It means there won’t be any more kids like me, Jericho!”
“But it needed to change.”
“No, it didn’t. Nothing about it needed to change. You didn’t need to rip up the driving range where I learned to hit a three-hundred-yard drive. You didn’t need to rip up the putting green where Coach Kowalski announced to everyone that I’d gotten my scholarship to TSU and was going to be the first person in my family to go away to college right out of high school. It’s all gone, and when you tripled the club’s fees, you made sure there won’t be any more working-class kids learning to golf here.”
“There’s more you don’t know,” he said.
“I damn well know how much a working-class family can afford, and I know how to do math!”
“Tiffany, I’ve been waiting for you to get back. Come to my office—”
“Where is your damn office, Jericho? It looks like the clubhouse is being torn down!”
“The other half of the clubhouse with the pro shop, restrooms, bag room, and offices is operational. I didn’t want to close the course while we were renovating.”
“Of course not. That would eat into your precious profits. You destroyed it for money, Jericho. You crushed the futures of all the kids who come to my elementary school clinics every summer. You destroyed NFA’s golf team by throwing them off the course, didn’t you?”
“Reducing NCC’s commitment to the public high school’s golf team was a strategic business decision.”
Hot tears ran down her face. “The driving range is torn up. The putting green is a disaster. The course itself is in ruins. I can’t do my clinics for the kids, and you’ve banished the high school team. You’ve destroyed the future, Jericho. There’s nothing left for me here. I’m going to Tennessee for the rest of the summer. I am tendering my resignation, Jericho Parr, and I quit.”
Tiffany poked the red dot on her phone to hang the hell up on him, and she crutched over to her car, pausing to swipe decline call every few seconds as Jericho tried to call her back. She threw her crutches like javelins into the back seat, hopped and got in, and backed out of her parking spot.
In the rearview mirror, she saw Jericho Parr sprint out of the partially demolished clubhouse, his phone in his hand and looking around wildly.
When she shifted the car into Drive, he saw her and ran down the aisle of the parking lot toward her, but she floored it.
He jogged to stop as she sped out of the parking lot, his hand clutching his blond hair like when he was poring over spreadsheets inked in red in his hotel room while she read a book or watched the Golf Channel.
At the turn to the main road, Tiffany paused at the stop sign, gulping air and calming herself down.
After twenty breaths, she looked both ways, engaged her turn signal, and sedately turned out on the main road to drive home.
As she carefully drove home, she said to her phone, “Call Coach Robinson at TSU.”