Under Parr

by Blair Babylon

  Royce said to the other guy without taking his eyes off of Tiffany, “I’ll handle it, Mark.” And then to her, “We know these golf bags aren’t yours. Move along and we won’t call the police, but I need you to leave the property.”

  Practiced coldness settled over Tiffany. She was as chill and solid as ice. Her parents had taught her that. Marines never lost their temper, and her mother was even calmer and colder than that.

  Tiffany pointed at her bag. “That golf bag, right there, the one with the driver headcover of Aristocat the Tiger, the mascot of Tennessee State University, that one is my bag.” Her legs trembled, and her knee brace might have been the only thing holding her up. “My name, Tiffany Jones, is on the bag tags, the one for the Tennessee State University golf team, and the one for the National Collegiate Finals, and the one for the Women’s Amateur US Open, among others.”

  Royce shook his head. “I said you need to leave the property.”

  Jericho’s voice projected across the patio as he marched toward them. “Is there a problem?”

  Tiffany continued glaring up at the caddie, who was looking over her head at Jericho. The guy said, “Mr. Parr, sir, this woman was asking about your bag.”

  “Didn’t you read the tee sheet for this morning? I registered a guest, Ms. Tiffany Jones. And here she is. And that is her bag.”

  “It didn’t look like her bag,” the guy said, fumbling over his words.

  Something directly behind her and above her head growled.

  Tiffany didn’t turn. The growl sounded like Jericho, but it might have been a great white shark who’d jumped out of the sea at the end of the fairway. That would explain why Royce’s eyes kept getting bigger and why he was stammering out his answers.

  Jericho’s voice was lower. “Didn’t Richard and Bob tell you when they went off duty that my guest and I were eating lunch in the clubhouse and would need our bags soon after?”

  Royce glanced back at the other guy and said, “Bob said something about you having a guest before he left.”

  Even though Royce the caddie was tall, he was staring upward at Jericho above her head by several inches, maybe six or more. “Get Ms. Jones’s and my bags and put them in my car immediately.”

  “I just didn’t think that nice of a bag looked like it could be hers.”

  More growling. And then, “Clean out your locker in the staff room and get out.”

  “You can’t—”

  “Bet me.”

  “Only the general manager can—”

  “The Parrs are founding members of the Narragansett Club. We still hold the deed to half the land in trust. The general manager will say, yes sir, Mr. Parr, to whatever I tell him to do. I said, clean out your locker and get the hell off my property.”

  Tiffany stood with her spine ramrod straight and her chin up.

  Royce tried to stare Jericho down for three seconds, and then he blinked, turned, and walked toward the clubhouse, his hands stuffed in his pockets.

  Jericho said, “Mark, put both our bags in my car.”

  “Yes sir, Mr. Parr.” He grabbed a clean towel out of the rack, wet it, and began wiping down the heads of their clubs even though they appeared shiny like they’d already been cleaned.

  Jericho offered Tiffany his arm as if they were living a century before. “Ms. Jones?”

  She slid her hand through his arm.

  As they were strolling around the clubhouse and out to the parking lot, Tiffany’s legs started trembling harder. That guy not listening to her when she’d identified her bag and then the threat of the police welled up inside her chest. The shakes moved up to her hands, and her eyes grew hot and began to leak. She wiped a tear away with the back of her hand.

  Jericho touched her elbow and stopped her. “Hey, hey. Don’t cry, Tiff. He’s just some asshole.”

  “I’m fine.”

  He stepped toward her, his arms spread. “Are you okay?”

  Tiffany scooted backward, ducking from under his arms. “I’m fine. I’m fine! I just don’t want to deal with this right now. Sometimes, it’s even more exhausting than other times. So I’m just going to go home. I’ll see you later, Jericho.”

  “Let me drive you home,” he said.

  “I said I was fine.”

  “I know, but let me drive you home.”

  “I don’t need you to drive me home.”

  “Look, you’re upset.”

  “I’m not upset. You want to see me upset?”

  Jericho flipped one hand in a helpless gesture. “I’m afraid you’ll speed a little or not see a stop sign or take a corner too fast, and you’ll get pulled over for it. Or even if you don’t do any of those things, you had a glass and a half of wine with lunch, which you don’t normally do. I don’t want to worry all night that maybe you didn’t get home.”

  Tiffany stopped walking. “You can’t drive me around all the time. That’s what my life is like. Every time I drive myself anywhere, somebody is worrying about me, whether it’s my parents or my cousins or whomever. That’s what my life is like.”

  Mark the caddie trotted past the two of them with both their bags slung over his shoulders. “Where?”

  Jericho pointed to his Jaguar, and the trunk popped up. “Put both of them in my Jag.”

  “You don’t have to—” Tiffany insisted.

  Jericho sighed. “If you’re adamant about it, I’ll back off, but this seems like one of those times where I should take care of you. You have surgery scheduled in a few days. If any little thing happens, it’ll delay the surgery, and it might be months before Dr. Cooper has another opening in his schedule. I pulled some strings to get you in there. I can at least make sure you get home safely today.”

  Being coddled felt alien. With the Marine for a father and a mother who could have been a drill sergeant, it’d never happened before in Tiffany’s life. Surely, someone should be standing over her right now, telling her in a stern voice that this was an opportunity for growth.

  When she didn’t speak, Jericho reached out and took her hand. “In this case, I’m just going to assume that silence means yes. Come on, I’ll bring you back to get your car tomorrow, or we’ll send a couple of the bag boys to drive it back. Newcastle Golf Club does not take enough advantage of their lackeys.”

  She let him lead her to his car, open the passenger-side door for her, and settle her inside.

  While he was walking around the car, Tiffany had an urge to jump out and get in her own car to drive herself home, but Jericho had her clubs in his trunk. She wouldn’t have left Narragansett Country Club without her bag one way or another, so she guessed she was stuck in his car.

  It seemed like enough of a reason to stay.

  Jericho folded his massive body into the driver’s seat and drove them out of the parking lot and onto the long, winding roads that hugged the shoreline.

  Seagrass grew through the beach sand and waved in the sea breeze that had kept them cool on the golf course despite the summer sunshine. Families played on the beaches, and people rode boogie boards on the waves.

  Jericho asked, “Better?”

  She nodded. “I never noticed there were so many beaches. I mean, of course, we live on the shoreline of the Sound, but the ocean is so vast like a solid steel-blue shell. I guess I’m pretty much always driving, so I never looked at the beaches. That’s why I was looking at the forest so much when you were driving me home from the doctor’s appointment. I never noticed all the trees and hills along the sides of I-95.”

  Jericho turned over his hand again near the gearshift, and Tiffany slid her fingers into his. He asked, “Speaking of Dr. Cooper, do you need a ride to the hospital Tuesday? Or someone to take care of you after the surgery?”

  “No, thanks. I’m going to stay with my parents for a few weeks. My mom took three days off of work to take me in for the surgery and baby me afterward.” As much as Tiffany’s mother ever babied anybody. She was probably going to post Tiffany’s PT schedule on the wall and blo
w a whistle when it was time to do her therapy.

  “Will you be okay? Do you need someone to hang around and watch TV with you or bring you take-out?”

  “My cousins signed up for shifts. Even my brother took an afternoon, and he never takes part in anything. I don’t even think I’m going to get any rest.”

  “Huh.”

  When Tiffany glanced at Jericho, he was squinting at the road a little as he drove, looking pensive. “Huh, what?”

  “When I had my shoulder done a few years ago, I hired a nurse and a personal chef to take care of me. My buddies stopped by to offer condolences and watch sports, but I can’t imagine asking one of them to change the dressings on my shoulder or anything.”

  “Didn’t your mom take care of you?”

  Jericho huffed a laugh. “I think that’s one of the reasons they sent me off to boarding school. When I was little, if I got sick, she hired a nurse to take care of me. She described taking care of sick children once as, and I quote, ‘Ew.’”

  Tiffany gripped his hand a little more tightly. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I’m glad your mom’s going to be taking care of you. If you need anything, anything at all, just text. I can bring you a pizza, or fill a prescription, or bring over a new tube of Neosporin if you need it. Anything you need, just shoot me a text.”

  “Okay. I will.”

  “And have somebody send me a text when you’re out of surgery, okay?”

  “I’ll text you as soon as they let me have my phone,” she said, which was not what he’d asked for, but her parents hadn’t caught them together and demanded an explanation over a meal.

  Yet.

  Jericho nodded. “Okay.”

  Just Don’t Lose

  Jericho

  Tuesday morning, Jericho paced.

  He paced in his hotel suite after Asia brought him his ham and eggs for one.

  He paced in his office at the Newcastle Golf Club while he tried to look at spreadsheets that were still bleeding money.

  Finally, when he couldn’t stand not hearing that Tiffany’s surgery was successful and she was recovering safely anymore, he went downstairs to the bag room, got his clubs, and inserted himself into a threesome going off at nine-thirty so he could pace the entire golf course while checking his texts after every shot.

  After playing all eighteen holes at a blistering pace, he walked back into his office at noon and called the other three Last Chance guys, catching the three of them at the office.

  Jericho sipped his fourth cup of coffee since three o’clock that morning and said, “I’ve been looking over the cash-flow analysis of this golf course all night. I spent hours at it and barely slept. I think I haven’t slept more than three hours since yesterday. I don’t know what to do with this place to increase its value.”

  Match was the first one to start talking, as usual. “We gave you some ideas when we were there a few weeks ago. Have you implemented everything?”

  “Not everything,” Jericho admitted. “There are some community reasons why some of those things won’t fly.”

  He could hear the groans over the speaker of his cell phone.

  Morrissey, ever the lawyer, asked him, “You didn’t buy a course that is on a historical registry, did you?”

  “No, it’s not that I can’t legally change some of the things; it’s just that I shouldn’t.”

  “You want to know what you shouldn’t do, Parr?” Match demanded. “You shouldn’t screw up your chance to win this bet. You got lucky. You picked up NGC for a song. You have a great chance of increasing its value a whole hell of a lot. If The Shark wins, a lot of people are going to be out of work when we liquidate our holdings to pay off Gabriel. You need to increase the value of that golf club, and you need to do it fast. It’s less than seven months until New Year’s Eve. Don’t lose it for us, okay?”

  “What about you guys?” Jericho retorted. “If any one of the four of us wins that bet, we’re in the clear. So why are you guys just sitting around on your asses instead of buying your own ventures and trying to win this bet? Why am I the only one who’s actually got a place so far?”

  Match yelled over the phone, “I’m closing on a venture this week, but I didn’t find a fire sale. I got what I could so at least I can start working on this and maybe we won’t lose. Morrissey is driving to hell and back looking at a thousand places that aren’t good enough for him. Skins is probably just going to the gym and praying, but I don’t know because we’re not supposed to talk about it. Gabriel probably has our office bugged.”

  Exclamations peppered the background noise.

  Match’s voice seemed closer to the phone. “It only takes one of us to win, but Gabriel could beat us all. We left you with a twelve-item list that would quadruple the club’s value by the end of the year. How many have you finished?”

  Jericho glanced at the document open on his computer. “Half of one, and I put in for building permits for two more.”

  “What the hell is the matter with you, Jericho? You’re not usually a scatterbrain like this. If this were a Last Chance venture, you’d be three-quarters of the way through the list and have contractor bids on the last few items. Is there a problem with this place? Would it be better to fail fast and try a different business?”

  Jericho glared at the perfectly reasonable action items they’d put together after the round of golf a month before. Match was right. Those improvements would substantially increase the value of the Newcastle Golf Club, and Jericho would stand a decent chance of winning and saving the business that they had built the last five years of their lives.

  He said to Match, “I’ll have the improvements finished before Labor Day.”

  Three agonizing hours later, Jericho received a text on his phone from Tiffany, telling him that Dr. Cooper had said the surgery had gone splendidly and she was fine. She was staying in the hospital overnight as planned and would be back in her childhood bedroom the following day.

  The last part of her text said, See you in four to six weeks.

  Four to six weeks?

  Right, because while Jericho had accidentally introduced Tiffany to his parents, Tiffany hadn’t stopped hiding in Jericho’s hotel bedroom when her cousin brought them room service breakfast at the Newcastle Inn and Spa.

  Plus, she kept making that stupid joke about her being Miss May.

  And the calendar in the corner of his computer said that day’s date was the first of June.

  Like all the other women Jericho dated, Tiffany had declared herself to be temporary, and Jericho had been stupid about it again.

  But as always, Jericho was excellent ex-boyfriend material.

  He texted back, I’m so glad the surgery went well. Let me know if I or NGC can do anything for you or if you need an emergency order of shrimp scampi from the Westerly House. Best, Jericho.

  When the head pro, Kowalski, came around with a get-well card, Jericho signed it the same way.

  Best, Jericho Parr.

  Without Tiffany around, the club seemed dilapidated and begging for refurbishment.

  He pressed the city permits department to approve his applications.

  The construction crews descended upon Newcastle Golf Club the following week.

  Kids Like Me

  Tiffany

  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 t
ears, 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.