Jericho ordered breakfast from room service the next morning.
Tiffany hid in his bedroom while breakfast was delivered even though a different girl than the one from the previous night pushed the cart into his hotel suite. Tiff said that somebody would tell Asia they’d seen Tiffany in his room, and she seemed confident that everybody in Newcastle would know her on sight. It was a small town.
They continued putting up a false front at the club, acting excruciatingly professional when anyone else was around, their demeanor even a little cool toward each other.
Luckily, because Tiffany was the assistant golf pro, she had ample reason to visit the office that Jericho had commandeered on the second floor of the clubhouse. Every time she walked into his office holding a sheaf of papers or announcing that a file had been uploaded into his cloud storage, he insisted she come inside his office to take a look at it, and she needed to shut the door behind her.
Sometimes, it was long, languorous kisses while she straddled him in his office chair.
Other times, he shoved her up against the wall and took her with her legs around his waist and his hand over her mouth, lest the Lady Captain hear them from her office just a few yards down the hall.
One time, he bent her over his desk and took her from behind, and then he couldn’t concentrate while he was sitting at his desk the rest of the day, believing that the green desk blotter was still warm from her soft tits and stomach where she’d lain.
Between Tiffany’s tight schedule and her tight body, Jericho forgot to ask how her appointment with his orthopedic specialist had gone. He’d called and booked the appointment for her because it was easier when a former patient paved the way.
They were standing in the back of the bag room with the door locked one evening, their clothes scattered on the floor around them. The fecund smell of grass clippings turning to humus filled the dim space between the bags.
Jericho was tucking his shirt back into his pants while Tiffany was hooking her bra. He asked, “What did my orthopedic surgeon say about your knee?”
Tiffany turned her head away from him and looked at something on the far wall, a subtle movement he was associating with her not wanting to talk about something. “He said there’s nothing he can do.”
“Nothing he can do? When he was fixing my shoulder, he said that orthopedics is like carpentry more than medicine. It’s just sawing bones and nailing ligaments back together. Knees can’t be that different than shoulders.”
“Yeah, well, I guess he’s not up to doing my knee.”
Jericho buckled his belt. “He’s one of the best surgeons in Connecticut. There’s really nothing beyond him, but maybe he’s better at shoulders than legs. I’ll find you somebody else.”
“You don’t need to—”
“I’ll just ask around. My friends always seem to be having some sort of work done, and some of it’s not even plastic surgery.”
Querying various group chats and private spaces on the internet took Jericho a week, but he found a guy who seemed to be more in line with what Tiffany needed.
They were back at the Newcastle Inn and Spa, hiding from Tiffany’s cousin again while they ordered room service for breakfast, when Jericho told Tiffany that she had an appointment the next afternoon at Yale Medical Center, and he would drive her over.
She frowned at him from where she was sitting up in bed and eating oatmeal with five different kinds of berries on top. “I can drive myself to New Haven. It’s less than two hours away.”
“I’ve just never heard an orthopedist say that they can’t fix something. I’m not a medical doctor, but it seems like it’d be bad for business if the word got out that Jones-Becker wasn’t competent at doing knees.”
At Dr. Jamal Cooper’s office the next day, Jericho was amusing himself wandering around looking at the poster-sized pictures of sports teams on the walls, most of which had Dr. Cooper squatting in the middle while several star players had their arms around him. Matching black and gold plaques announced that Dr. Jamal Cooper was an official team doctor of the Boston Celtics and the New York Knicks. Other pictures showed Dr. Cooper with baseball players, hockey players, and even a couple of professional golfers.
Tiffany already had x-rays and MRIs of her leg, so they’d had those scans sent over ahead of time.
Jericho walked into the exam room behind Tiffany without asking because it seemed like a good idea to have an assertive male there if she needed some backup.
Dr. Cooper bent from where he sat in his office chair, crouching in front of Tiffany and manipulating her knee to examine her mobility and where movement started to hurt her. The orthopedic surgeon was a tall, half-bald man with the burly physique and wide skull of a former football player, which he confirmed when he and Tiffany got to talking about college sports at HBCUs. When Tiffany said that she’d received a golf scholarship to Tennessee State, Dr. Cooper had grinned and told them that he’d had a football scholarship to Howard University, where he’d been a linebacker.
As Dr. Cooper rotated and bent her leg, he asked Tiffany if this or that movement hurt her dozens of times, and Jericho was about ready to slap the doctor away from her because it seemed like everything hurt her. Jericho didn’t like that.
Finally, Dr. Cooper released her leg and scooted back in his wheeled chair to resume his place at the computer. “You have a partial but severe rupture of the patellar tendon directly below your kneecap. Your knee should have been repaired within a week of the injury, but I believe I can repair it to be, at a minimum, mostly functional, with the debriding technique I developed to reduce the scar tissue on the ruptured tendon. It’s a fairly straightforward case. You could make a complete recovery suitable to play professional sports, but much of the result depends on your commitment to physical therapy afterward.”
“Oh, I will,” Tiffany said, nodding. “I can do as much PT as you can throw at me.”
He laughed. “I’ll hold you to that. Considering your job, you’ll probably need to take six weeks off for recovery. If you work hard on your PT, you might be able to shave it down to a month.”
“Oh, I couldn’t take off that kind of time,” she said.
Jericho butted in. “The blue-chip insurance program includes short-term disability and covers up to twelve weeks of salary. You can.” See? Jericho was good backup.
Tiffany bit her lower lip and still looked worried.
Dr. Cooper said, “I had a cancellation on my surgical schedule next week. If you want it, it’s yours.”
Tiffany dithered, “That soon? Oh, I couldn’t. I have lessons scheduled—”
“She’ll take it,” Jericho said.
Tiffany glared at him. “But I have this asshole boss who won’t let me get a word in edgewise.”
Jericho snarled, “I’ll crack his head open.”
Dr. Cooper was watching both of them with wide, concerned eyes until Tiffany couldn’t keep a straight face and started laughing, which cracked Jericho up, too.
As they were leaving, Jericho asked Dr. Cooper, “Is the surgery routine?”
“Well, no surgery is routine,” he said. “But my scar-tissue reduction technique is certainly not experimental. I’ve done hundreds of them with excellent outcomes. If Tiger Woods had come to me, I could have had that leg of his back to a hundred percent within three months.”
Jericho lowered his voice. “No, I mean, could her leg have been fixed without surgery?”
Dr. Cooper frowned at him and tilted his head. “She already had a splint and immobilized it for six weeks right after it happened, according to what she told me. I don’t know why they even tried that. A tear of that magnitude will never heal with mere immobilization. Ruptures like that always require surgery. I’m surprised she’s able to walk on it at all, to tell you the truth. I consider a tear like that disabling. There was no medical reason not to schedule surgery to repair it immediately.”
“Is there a reason why an orthopedic surgeon wouldn’t attempt a tendon repair like this one?”
The dark skin between Dr. Cooper’s eyebrows folded into confused wrinkles. “Maybe they’re not very good at surgery?”
Jericho hoped that wasn’t the case. “Do you know Dr. Gary Jones-Becker?”
Dr. Cooper’s frown deepened. “I know of him. He has privileges at Yale Medical Center, too. He’s supposed to be good, though his clientele runs toward geriatric tennis injuries, not professional athletes.”
Oh, hey, Jericho felt so much better that his shoulder was classified as a geriatric tennis injury. “I’m glad she’ll be in your hands, Dr. Cooper.”
On the drive back to Newcastle from Yale, Jericho said to Tiffany, “Tell me exactly what Dr. Jones-Becker said about your leg when you saw him last week.”
Even though Jericho was driving and the ribbon of the highway stretched far off into the rolling green hills, he saw out of the corner of his eye that Tiffany was staring out the passenger-side window of his Jag. Her voice sounded distant when she spoke. “He said that he didn’t see anything there worth repairing.”
“Worth repairing?” Jericho asked. “Cooper said it was a straightforward case. Those kinds of ruptures get surgery.”
She was still staring out the window. “He probably meant that I’m not worth repairing.”
Jericho tried to wrap his head around that statement as they passed a large rest stop and continued driving through the wild forest between New England towns. “You mean, like, had he seen you play golf somewhere? But that can’t be it. You played college golf. That’s not easy. And you had a scholarship. And you were being scouted to go pro, right? But it doesn’t even matter what he thought of your golf game. It’s still an injury that needs repairing, whether or not you go back to being a professional athlete and try out for LPGA Q-school or one of the minor tours.”
“No,” Tiffany said, her voice lilting in a tone that he’d come to think of as deceptively light. “It’s either because I’m a woman or because I’m Black, but it’s probably both.”
Shock slammed into Jericho like he’d been beaned between his eyes with a speeding golf ball. “I beg your pardon?”
She shrugged, a sinuous movement of her shoulders that Jericho could just see on the other side of his car as he watched the road. “Women usually have to go to doctors multiple times before they’ll even order tests because doctors think it’s either stress, or hormones, or women being ‘hysterical.’ It takes years to get a diagnosis for anything. And Black people are usually denied medical testing and procedures because doctors just don’t do it. Either the doctors think Black people are trying to get prescription painkillers or they think we’re lazy and want disability, or they just don’t care. So Black women get a double whammy. I’m used to it. I deal with it.” She sighed. “It’s just a lot of effort to deal with it sometimes.”
“What? I—you think Jones-Becker did that to you?”
Jericho was mostly watching the highway but was also sneaking little glances over at Tiffany, and she caught him looking at her. She nodded. “He said he didn’t see anything worth repairing, Jericho. I’m the thing he saw that wasn’t worth repairing.”
“That motherfucker,” Jericho growled. “I’ll put the word out. My geriatric friends with tennis injuries will go somewhere else for their surgeries.”
Tiffany sighed. “You don’t have to do that, and they probably won’t do it anyway.”
“Yeah, well, but then I’ll know which friends of mine will and which ones won’t, and that’s an important piece of information for when I’m deciding who I’ll do business with. Or who I’ll play a round of golf with for that matter.”
She patted his shoulder. “It’s okay. You don’t have to.”
Jericho resumed watching the road out the front windshield of his Jaguar as they sped along the rural highway, effortlessly passing other cars. He took his right hand off the steering wheel and laid it palm-up on the console between the two bucket seats.
She slipped her cool fingers in his, and Jericho smiled as they drove toward Newcastle. “Do you need someone to look after you while you recover from the surgery?”
“I think my mom and dad will force me to live at home for a while at least, and then I’ll be back at the club, giving lessons on crutches.”
He chuckled because he could see her doing that. “Let me know if you need anything, even a special delivery of shrimp scampi from the Westerly House.”
She squeezed his hand. “I’ll let you know.”
“I’m selfishly glad the surgery isn’t until next week, so we can golf at the Narragansett Club this weekend.”
She laughed. “Me, too. I would have put off the surgery to play there!”
Jericho chuckled. “A woman after my own heart.”