Under Parr

by Blair Babylon

  Yes, Tiffany had mentioned more than once that her father had been in the Marines.

  Jericho turned to her mother first because she was closer. “It’s nice to meet you, Robin.”

  Her mother’s eyebrows raised, and her voice lowered. “You may call me Mrs. Jones.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Jericho knew not to make the same mistake twice. He turned to Tiffany’s father. “And it’s an honor to meet you, sir.”

  Her father’s scowl deepened. “Don’t call me sir. I work for a living. It’s Master Sergeant Jones.”

  “Yes, um—”

  “Master Sergeant.”

  “Yes, Master Sergeant,” Jericho said, feeling chastised but not knowing exactly why. “Thank you for your service.”

  Mrs. Jones invited Jericho to sit on a chair while Tiffany’s parents flanked her on the couch. Her parents were still glaring at him.

  Jericho cleared his throat. “It seems there’s been a misunderstanding.”

  From somewhere in the back of the house, a door slammed, and female voices called from back there.

  “Sis!”

  “Bestie!”

  “Where are you?”

  Two more women who bore a familial resemblance to Tiffany and her mother came into the living room.

  One of them was Asia, the room service waitstaff who delivered Jericho’s breakfast on most mornings at the Newcastle Inn and Spa.

  Asia piped up, “Oh, hi there, Mr. Parr. What are you doing here?” Her eyes drew a line from Jericho to Tiffany and Tiffany’s two angry parents. “I knew it. I knew it! That was too much breakfast for one person that I was bringing you every day.”

  Master Sergeant Isaac Jones sprang from his seat. “What!”

  Tiffany whacked him on the leg with the back of her hand. “Sit, Daddy. That is none of your business.”

  He sat, but his scowl at Jericho had turned into an active snarl.

  Tiffany said to Jericho, “These are two of my cousins, Asia and Imani.”

  Jericho folded his hands and remained very still. “I was hoping we could talk alone.”

  “Anything you have to say to me, you can say in front of my family. So, what are you here about?”

  Nerves began to rattle in the back of Jericho’s head. “I wanted to explain to you why I had to make the changes I did to Newcastle Country Club.”

  “I can’t believe you changed the name. It sounds so stuck-up now,” she said.

  “It was important for me to increase the value of the club as much as I could by the end of the calendar year.”

  Tiffany frowned at him. “Why? Do you need it for collateral for a loan or something?”

  The rattle in the back of his head was getting worse. “There was a bet.”

  Tiffany stared at him. “You destroyed Newcastle Golf Club over a bet?”

  Her mother clicked her tongue. “Gambling.”

  “It wasn’t just any wager,” Jericho tried to explain. “It was a bet between me and three friends of mine against this other guy, Gabriel Fish. We call him The Shark. We all have to buy one golf-related business, and the person who increases the value of their property the most wins. So essentially, it’s the four of us against The Shark, because if any of us win, then we don’t have to pay off the other guys. But if all four of us lose and Gabriel wins, it’ll destroy the business we’ve built up over the last five years. We’ll have to liquidate everything to pay it off.”

  “How much did you bet?” Tiffany asked, squinting at him.

  Jericho swallowed. “A hundred million dollars each.”

  Tiffany and her family reared back and dodged around like a herd of attacking bats had swept through the room and slapped them with their wings.

  Tiffany asked Jericho, “Are you crazy? You bet a hundred million dollars on anything?”

  Jericho shrugged. “It was New Year’s Eve. We were drunk.”

  Tiffany’s cousins gasped and looked at each other and then around the room and ceiling as if they were trying to find the source of such a sacrilegious thing that had been uttered in such a God-fearing home.

  Tiffany shook her head at Jericho. “Jeez, you could’ve said anything but that.”

  Master Sergeant Jones stood up again, but he gestured to his family instead of yelling at Jericho. “Alcohol. This man drinks alcohol.” He leaned down to Tiffany. “You have brought a man who drinks alcohol into our house.”

  Tiffany rolled her eyes and tugged on her father’s hand, and he sat back down.

  Mrs. Jones’s lips were pressed so tightly together that her jaw bulged at the sides, but she parted them slightly to hiss, “‘Neither thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor gamblers will inherit the kingdom of God.’”

  “It doesn’t matter how it happened,” Jericho said, although evidently, it did. “What matters is that there was a signed contract, and if one of us doesn’t win, we’re going to owe Gabriel Fish four hundred million dollars. I have to do my part. I was the first one to find a good property and buy it, which means I have fairly good odds of winning this thing and saving Last Chance, Inc. I can’t throw away this opportunity to save my company, thousands of jobs, and my friends’ life savings for one golf course’s perceived stature in a small New England town.”

  Tiffany shook her head sadly. “You think it’s just any old golf course in some random town in upstate Connecticut, but our community is all we have. My dad served his country. My mother has worked her butt off to build the First United Methodist Church into the thriving community it is today. She runs the church’s food pantry and the minister’s fund, all while working full time and putting the fear of God into any insurance company that tries to stick one of her doctors’ patients with the bill. Whenever there’s a problem in Newcastle, my parents handle it. They’re pillars of this community like NGC was.”

  Jericho said, “NGC was insolvent. It had already failed. Your paycheck bounced before I came in and covered it, and I rescued that golf course. If I hadn’t bought it, the fairways would be overgrown with weeds by now, and it would be just another derelict property in this town. NFA’s golf team wouldn’t have anywhere to practice at all.”

  “You saved it, but then you ruined it,” she said.

  “At least I kept it going, and I’m improving it.”

  “This is my community, Jericho. I’ve tried to explain to you what that means to us. When I was growing up and trying to get a scholarship, my high school and NGC and Coach Kowalski helped me. I couldn’t have done any of this without their help. These kids right now that are trying to succeed, Newcastle Golf Club is supposed to help them. That’s what you destroyed. You didn’t just make a clubhouse bigger and a driving range longer. You didn’t just bring in new clientele. You ripped NGC out of the community that it was sustaining. Regular families won’t be able to afford memberships anymore. Kids won’t ever start golf now, and they won’t get college scholarships, and they’ll continue to be mired in a life of living paycheck-to-paycheck and praying there’s enough money at the end of the month. People’s lives are precarious, and there’s one less pillar holding us up now.”

  Jericho shook his head. “The other three Last Chance guys—Mitchell, Morrissey, and Kingston—are my family. The three of us arrived at boarding school in Switzerland with no one and nothing, and we banded together. We’re closer than brothers. I can’t throw them to the wolves or The Shark. I couldn’t have done anything differently,” he told her.

  “I know, and neither can I. I’ll be leaving for TSU in a few days to attend an intensive summer program with Coach Robinson because there’s nothing left for me here. I’ve already confirmed with her that I’ll be there for practice next Monday morning. Please leave, Jericho. I don’t think we have anything else to say to each other.”

  And so, he did.

  Jericho left the house, got into his car, and drove back to NCC, where he stared at spreadsheets that were still bleeding red for several more hours, even though he didn’t comprehend any
thing he was looking at.

  He hadn’t had a choice. Newcastle Golf Club had been insolvent, and he’d swooped in and bought it when it was going under for the third time.

  He had a moral obligation to Mitchell, Morrissey, and Kingston to try to win the bet so they wouldn’t be wiped out.

  So why did he feel like shit?

  The Shark

  Jericho

  Sometimes, Jericho did not know what he was thinking.

  When Gabriel “The Shark” Fish had again contacted him out of the blue after months of radio silence, Jericho accepted his offer to come to Newcastle Country Club and play a round of golf to give him some advice. That text Jericho had received while he and Tiffany had been having lunch with his parents had been just the beginning.

  Way to tip his hand.

  When he’d texted Mitchell, Morrissey, and Kingston and told them how stupid he was, they seemed thrilled.

  You can pump The Shark for information!

  I heard he’s bought a biz. Can you figure out what it is?

  Feed him some lies. Tell him that we’ve all quadrupled the net value of the clubs we bought and he’s losing. That’ll psych him out. And then he’ll make a mistake.

  A few days after the disaster at Tiffany’s parents’ house, Jericho met Gabriel Fish in the parking lot of Newcastle Country Club, shook hands with him amid the roar of the bulldozers and backhoes while the crane swung beams overhead, and took The Shark straight out to the golf course.

  Jericho pointed down the lush fairway, flanked by fluttering orange mesh. “Anything marked by the orange construction fencing is out of bounds, but you get a free drop parallel to where your ball crossed the fence but no nearer to the flag.”

  Gabriel nodded as he surveyed the fairway. “I looked at the architectural model of the new clubhouse you have in the dining room. Not very ambitious.”

  Jericho settled his ball on the tee and took a wide swing at it, pounding the ball down the fairway. Playing golf with Tiffany regularly over the last few months had improved his game, from her tips and tweaks to just the healthy competition and getting out on the course several times a week. “I didn’t realize you’d been inside the clubhouse.”

  “I’ve been here for hours, looking around.”

  Jericho’s stomach soured, and he swallowed the bitterness at the back of his throat down with a swig of sugary fruit punch sports drink from the bottle in his golf bag. “Hours, huh?”

  “Yeah, I wanted to get the lay of the land, the insider trading information, so to speak.”

  Well, Jericho had invited Gabriel Fish to the club and given him access. He had no one to blame but himself. “I look forward to your advice.”

  Which Jericho should be wary of.

  And yet, Gabriel Fish was known for running his mouth when he shouldn’t, which was probably how the New Year’s Eve bet had begun.

  They played the first few holes with Gabriel providing a running commentary about Newcastle Country Club, the bet, friends of theirs from school, politics, news, and anything else that came to his mind. “Did you hear about how Maxence took the throne in Monaco? From the outside, it looked like their regular Hamlet-style election, but I heard Marie-Therese tried to have him executed. She always seemed like a snapper at school, right? Like one day, she was going to snap and kill someone. At least that’s all over with now.”

  Jericho was distracted by the golf course, and the echoes of Tiffany on the tee boxes and greens haunted him.

  On the first hole, he remembered how she had sunk that no-look putt and then tricked him into retrieving her ball with the word GOTCHA printed on it.

  On the second’s tee box, she had interrogated him for information about his plans for the club, the results of which he saw all around him.

  On the fifth hole, the long par five, the storm shelter behind the green held memories of her soft skin, the fluttering of her eyelashes as he touched her, and the tangy taste of her on his tongue.

  By the seventh hole, The Shark was on a roll, speaking through Jericho’s silence that he had mistaken for agreement with his ideology and plans.

  After they teed off, Gabriel Fish gestured to the heart-shaped green of the short par three. “This is a sweet little track, but you’re settling for being just a better alternative to that muni twenty minutes away. The only money coming in from this golf course is slightly higher dues than the old operation, and it went bankrupt. I heard they couldn’t even pay their people. Middle-class, middle-brow membership dues aren’t the way of the future, Jericho. You need something that will attract billionaires from Manhattan and Silicon Valley.”

  Jericho approached his ball lying on the green. “Newcastle Golf Club has been an important part of this community for decades. It was a good investment because the community sustained it for so long, not because mismanagement drove it under in the last few years.”

  Gabriel’s ball was about thirty feet from the hole, a long putt, but possible. He squatted behind his ball, holding his putter like a pendulum as he plumb-bobbed the ground, trying to discern which way his ball would break as it rolled. “You don’t want this to be just a golf course, Jericho. You want this to be a golf destination. You’ve got that huge tract of land on the other side of the driving range. Yeah, all that forest is pretty to look at, but there’s nothing back there but Lyme Disease ticks and poison ivy. That land isn’t making you any money, but you’re paying taxes on it. You need to open up something back there that will bring in people with money, real money, not the poors who live around here.”

  Jericho watched Gabriel squint at the putting green and waited.

  Gabriel said, “You should use that land to build a casino or a bar. You can’t build a billion-dollar operation on clients with working-class salaries.”

  Jericho stood behind his ball, watching. “Some things are more important than wringing every last dime you can out of a property.”

  Gabriel Fish cracked up, bowing his head as he laughed, and then took his position to putt his ball. “Not if you’re trying to win a bet.”

  Jericho shrugged and waited.

  The Shark putted his ball and stepped back, confident.

  Halfway to the hole, his golf ball took a sharp right turn and rolled away from the hole, the exact opposite of what he’d obviously thought would happen.

  Gabriel pointed at it. “What the hell?”

  Jericho took his stance over his golf ball and surveyed the green.

  In the storm shack, Tiffany had told him that the seventh green was an optical illusion, a tilted piece of land lying within a larger slant. They’d played the hole together dozens of times from every part of the green and with every pin position, and she was right. Every ball rolled toward the two pine trees on the left.

  He lined up the ball and tapped it with his flat putter, watching it meander toward the side of the green and then turn back toward the hole.

  The Shark gestured toward Jericho’s golf ball. “How the hell is it doing that? That ball is rolling uphill in defiance of all the laws of gravity and physics!”

  Jericho watched the ball gather speed as it rolled toward the cup. “Sometimes, Gabriel, it’s not what you know, but who. This is my home course now, where I’m a member of the community. I take care of this course and the people here—”

  His ball dived into the hole and rattled in the bottom of the cup.

  “—and they take care of me.”

  Gabriel Fish was gaping at the hole, dumbfounded. “How the hell did that ball do that? Do you have magnets under the green or something?”

  Jericho said, “I need to do the right thing with this golf course, which is to integrate it into the community, not sell it out to the billionaires from New York City or Silicon Valley.”

  “So you’re going to deliberately lose the bet and sell out the rest of the Last Chance guys? I mean, don’t let me talk you out of it.”

  Jericho shook his head. “I didn’t say that.”

  After they finis
hed the round, Jericho went back to his office in the clubhouse and pulled out the blueprints for the entire property.

  Gabriel Fish had been right about one thing; those woods behind the driving range were nothing but poison ivy, Lyme Disease ticks, and a tax liability.

  That area needed to be utilized, and Jericho had the perfect idea how.

  Tennessee State

  Tiffany

  In the middle of July, Tiffany flew to Tennessee State University and was on the driving range and ready to play on the sweltering first day of Coach Robinson’s intensive summer golf clinic. She wore her leg brace for the first few weeks and then slowly decreased the amount of time she wore it while keeping up with her physical therapy at the university.

  Her leg had not felt so solid since before she injured it. By the first week of August, she was moving around without a limp and walking thirty-six holes of golf with the rest of the aspiring professional golfers.

  As a matter of fact, practicing at NGC and coaching the NFA golf team and amateurs every day for nearly two years had been good for Tiffany’s game. She picked right up where she left off and was quickly the best at the clinic. She also was the first to walk onto the range in the morning and the last one to stagger off the putting green at night, but that had always been her personality.

  Since she would only be in Tennessee for a few weeks, Coach Robinson let Tiffany stay with her. Coach’s last teenager had just left home to go to college at Howard University, probably just to spite his mother.

  Tiffany slept in a twin bed in a room decorated with Howard University football memorabilia, but she talked golf with Coach Robinson at breakfast and supper in her kitchen decorated in TSU’s colors of white and royal blue under a portrait of TSU’s mascot, Aristocat the Tiger, and she played golf as long as there was sunlight.

  Five weeks passed in a glorious rush.

  The golf and the work were so intense that Tiffany had little time to miss Jericho Parr, and yet somehow, he weaseled into her thoughts.