Home > Under Parr(7)

Under Parr(7)
Author: Blair Babylon

That was the job of the office manager or head pro, but Loralinda was out sick for the day and Coach Kowalski had just abrogated his responsibility. Plus, Tiffany had more than a half-hour left before her next appointment, and Jericho really should have an orientation before he worked another shift. “Okay, fine. Let’s go.”

They stowed their clubs in the caddie shack at the end of the driving range, and she took him on a tour of the club.

“Newcastle Golf Club was founded over seventy years ago,” Tiffany told him as they hiked through the trail cut through the high grass back toward the clubhouse. She was in the lead, as was proper because she was showing him around. “The original members used to talk about how they would play eighteen holes and then walk the course a second time, prying stones out of the ground and building the rock walls you’ll see lining the fairways.”

When she glanced back, Jericho had picked up a stick from somewhere and was absently smacking the thigh-high grass as they walked. “Are many of the original members still here?”

Tiffany chuckled. “Only a few of them are left. A lot of their kids are members now, but even those ‘kids’ are in their sixties and up. Newcastle GC has been a part of the community here for decades. It’s a polling place during elections, and it was the place to have your wedding reception for decades. But then the Wedding Barn opened up over in North Middletown.”

“Don’t you have to be a member to rent out the clubhouse and grounds?”

“Oh, no. We’re not fancy like the Narragansett Club over in Rhode Island. We’ll rent out the clubhouse, the course, or Head Pro Kowalski for the right price.”

His eyes brightened, and he chuckled. “Right. How long is your waiting list for membership?”

“Waiting list?” She laughed. “We don’t have a waiting list. As a matter of fact, we have a membership sale going on right now where you only have to pay half the initiation fee for family memberships.”

His smile drooped, and lines pressed between his sandy brown eyebrows. “Doesn’t that decrease your profit margin? Or do you make up for it with volume?”

“Oh no, we don’t make up for anything with volume. We are at our lowest membership level ever right now. When Freemont-Macintosh closed the plant on the east side of town five years ago, almost half of our members resigned within six months, either because they had to move somewhere else for a job or they didn’t have the extra money anymore.”

Jericho gestured toward the horizon. “The median income of Newcastle County is almost a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. That’s more than enough of a population base to support a small country club.”

“Yeah, but that isn’t in Newcastle. People at that income level live in the McMansion developments where the cornfields used to be and send their kids to private schools. A lot of them don’t golf, or they’re into sailing. Plus, Newcastle as a town is shrinking. The schools all have budget problems due to declining enrollment. How long have you lived in Newcastle that you don’t know this?”

“I don’t live in Newcastle,” he said.

“Then why did you apply for a job at NGC?” she asked him.

He waved his hand vaguely toward the eighteenth hole that lay at the base of the small hill they were walking over. “I’m planning to move closer if this works out.”

“Oh, okay.” They walked a little more, and the clubhouse came into view. “I thought it was weird that I wouldn’t remember you from high school, but you’re a few years older than I am. We wouldn’t have been there at the same time.” She turned around and walked backward on the path while she was talking to him. “Were you on your golf team in high school?”

Jericho caught up to her, and he must’ve thrown his stick away because he was holding a straw-stiff dead weed and breaking the hollow tube into pieces as they strolled. “Yeah. I was on the varsity team for two years, but it wasn’t a competitive sports school. Honestly, our sports were barely more advanced than intramural.”

“What were you, Division Five?”

“Something like that.”

“Did you play golf in college? Wait, I didn’t mean to ask that. I meant, how much golf have you played since high school?” A lot of people in the working-class town of Newcastle hadn’t gone to college. Her dad had only gotten his bachelor’s degree through the military, but he’d never commissioned as an officer.

Jericho idly tossed pieces of his dead weed into the tall meadow grass around them. “I didn’t play college sports except in the rec leagues. The golf team was good at my university. I didn’t begin to qualify. You did, though.”

“Yeah, I did. Division One.”

Okay. Evidently, he’d gone to college then, at least some. The mystery of why Jericho Parr was employed as a bag boy deepened, but things happened to people in life. Some of her friends’ older sibs and her cousins had a sojourn in rehab or prison and had to begin again. At least Jericho was starting from somewhere and looked like he might work his way up.

Tiffany said, “Tennessee State has a great ladies’ golf team, and it was an honor to be a part of it. We won the LPGA’s National Minority Collegiate Tournament twice while I was there, and we darn near did the other two years, too. We placed at the National Collegiate Tournament, too.”

“That’s impressive,” Jericho said. “You must’ve been good in high school.”

“I was on the varsity team for three years.”

He grinned, and he was even more handsome when he smiled like that. “Yeah, that’s pretty good.”

And now, for some dumb reason, she wanted to impress him. “I was three years old when my dad stuck a golf club in my chubby little hand.”

He laughed. “Ah, you were a toddler golf prodigy like Tiger Woods.”

Oh, yeah, sure. That was the obvious comparison, and she jerked her chin up and flipped her box braids in back of her shoulders as she kept walking.

He asked, “Was your dad in the military, too, like Tiger’s?”

Tiffany grumbled, “Yes.”

Okay, the comparison was apt, accurate, and way too dang obvious, but couldn’t he have picked anyone else?

“Your dad should have gotten you on David Letterman or Ellen, like Tiger was on the Mike Douglas Show when he was two years old. I’ll bet you wouldn’t have had to move the ball closer to the hole to putt it in like Tiger did.”

Okay, that was a little better. “Yeah, but Tiger was living out in California. We’ve always lived in BFE, although all over the world BFE. No talent scouts from the Tonight Show were hanging out on the driving range at Fort Mag in the Philippines or Camp Hansen on Okinawa.”

As they approached the clubhouse, Jericho asked, “That’s pretty cool that you lived overseas. I went off to a boarding school in Switzerland when I was six, and they lugged us all over the world during school breaks.”

“When I was about to start high school, my dad got stationed in Afghanistan and Saudi again for no reason that he could speak of. We’re supposed to say he was a drill sergeant, but he was a Marine Raider, which is the special forces branch that does the murdering. We couldn’t stay with him there, and my mom wouldn’t have raised her three daughters and one son in Saudi Arabia, anyway. He managed to get stationed here at the Navy sub base down in New London for his last posting. He retired a few years ago. My mom’s family has been here ever since anyone can remember, though.”

Hot Books
» House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City #1)
» A Kingdom of Flesh and Fire
» From Blood and Ash (Blood And Ash #1)
» A Million Kisses in Your Lifetime
» Deviant King (Royal Elite #1)
» Den of Vipers
» House of Sky and Breath (Crescent City #2)
» The Queen of Nothing (The Folk of the Air #
» Sweet Temptation
» The Sweetest Oblivion (Made #1)
» Chasing Cassandra (The Ravenels #6)
» Wreck & Ruin
» Steel Princess (Royal Elite #2)
» Twisted Hate (Twisted #3)
» The Play (Briar U Book 3)