Under Parr

by Blair Babylon

  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 roari
ng 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.”

  Community

  Jericho

  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 hi
s 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.”