Under Parr

by Blair Babylon

  Yeah, he’d heard that before.

  While they played the round of golf, the three guys from Last Chance, Inc. grilled him on membership numbers, initiations and dues, average net profit per member, and the overall business of Newcastle Golf Club.

  Jericho had been studying the numbers for the past couple of days, and he had all those digits at his fingertips. While one guy was swinging, the other three guys had their phones out and ran calculations and scenarios on their calculators or spreadsheet apps.

  Morrissey Sand was Last Chance’s math whiz, and for every number Jericho threw at him, Morrissey swatted back three. “The overall financial structure of the club should have been sound because the demographics around here are golden. If you look at the town of Newcastle’s average income, it’s not enough to support a good country club. The new wealth is concentrated in that McMansion housing development. Incomes in that neighborhood should be in the upper quintile, which means most of those people should have the disposable income to belong to a social club of some sort. That McMansion zone is only ten minutes away using the bypass that routes traffic around the one-way, cow-path streets of downtown Newcastle.”

  Kingston Moore, however, was a sociologist as much as he was a businessman. “That McMansion housing development is going to be key. That’s where you need to concentrate your advertising. A lot of the houses within the city limits look a hundred years old, and not in a good way. They look like somebody needs to start enforcing fire and building codes. I saw a bunch of hole-in-the-wall restaurants that probably have amazing food, but I didn’t see any nice restaurants where people from the McMansions can go for Saturday date night or take their law clients to. Also, the nearest marina is seventy-five miles away, so the people who settled here aren’t yacht people. This community needs an upscale, exclusive country club that every successful person needs to belong to if they’re going to do business in this town, and you can charge them an appropriate fee to get in.”

  Mitchell Saltonstall was Last Chance’s blood-and-guts businessman, a guy who looked affable enough but who made sure all their businesses turned in respectable numbers every month. “Your biggest problem is your profit-per-member number. Your restaurant isn’t turning a profit at all, and the bar profit is the most anemic I have ever seen. How did these inept managers lose money selling alcohol? I didn’t think that was possible.”

  At the end of the round, Jericho had five pages of notes and twelve emergency action items that he had dictated into his phone as his friends ripped apart the Newcastle Golf Club’s operation and finances.

  They were right, though.

  Newcastle Golf Club was not a charity, and it was Jericho’s only chance to win that stupid New Year’s Eve bet with Gabriel Fish.

  Jericho couldn’t allow sentimental nostalgia to guide his business decisions. If he screwed up Newcastle Golf Club, it could bankrupt himself, his businesses, Last Chance, Inc., and his friends.

  Hair Day

  Tiffany

  Early Saturday morning before the summer sun peeked over the horizon, Tiffany washed and blow-dried her hair, and then she arrived at her parents’ house only to find her cousins Imani and Asia already in her mother’s kitchen.

  Her mom was working on Asia’s hair, her fingers deftly plaiting inch-wide jumbo box braids. After twenty years of doing three girls’ hair every other week, she was quick at it.

  Imani stood at the kitchen counter, wearing Tiffany’s mother’s strawberry apron and rolling out pie crust.

  “Dang it! I swear, I swear you two are cheating,” Tiffany grumped as she flung her groceries and other shopping bags on the table. “It’s eight-oh-nine! How could you two have gotten here ‘after eight’ and yet you’re already getting braided?”

  Imani and Asia smirked, and Tiffany’s own mother tutted at her. “They got up bright and early. Asia walked into the kitchen as the clock struck eight—”

  “Because you were sitting outside in your car for fifteen minutes, weren’t you?” Tiffany interrogated Asia, but Asia just sat there smirking and flinching as Tiffany’s mom scraped her hair into tight sections and braided it.

  “—and so she’s first,” Tiffany’s mother said over her. “You arrived last, which means you get to—”

  “I know, I know,” Tiffany grumbled. “Peel the potatoes.”

  Nobody liked to peel the potatoes.

  “There’s an eight-pound bag under the sink, so you get to it.” Her mother precisely parted Asia’s fluffy poof of hair using a steel rat-tail comb, sectioning the next area of her scalp into a neat box, and then banding and braiding Asia’s hair as she added in the long hair extensions that would swing past Asia’s shoulders.

  Tiffany rolled her eyes, found the bag under the sink, and sat down at the kitchen table to peel eight pounds of potatoes for Saturday family dinner at two. “Who’s all coming?”

  “Does it matter?” her mother asked as she yanked Asia’s hair into perfectly plaited braids.

  “Just wondering who I’m peeling these potatoes for.” Tiffany got to work.

  Tiffany’s mother eyed her as she braided. She’d run a doctor’s medical practice as the business manager for ten years and brooked no arguments from doctors or insurance companies, let alone one of her children or nieces. “Are you going to want those little knobby ponytail holders all over your head again?”

  Tiffany said, “No, I bought some flat, gold bands for the ends this time.”

  “Mmmm, fancy. You got a wedding you’re going to or something?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “It’s just as well. I whacked my knuckles six times putting those balls in. They were cute, though.”

  “Did Jericho Parr think they were cute?” Asia asked Tiffany.

  Tiffany scowled at her. “How would I know?”

  Her mother asked, “Who’s Jericho Parr?”

  And dang it. Of course, her mother would pick that up and run with it.

  Asia piped up, “He’s the new bag boy at the golf club. Tiffany said he’s hot.”

  “I did not.” Tiffany sliced a thick layer of peel off of a potato, and it landed in the growing pile on a paper towel. “I said he was new bag room staff. Latoya Miller told you he was hot. She thinks every guy is hot because she’s sixteen and befuddled with hormones.”

  Her mother asked, “Why are you looking at bag boys? They’re all seventeen-year-old children or sixty-year-old dirty old men.”

  Tiffany started to say that Jericho wasn’t either one of those, but Imani butted in. “Tiffany said he’s thirty years old and still a bag boy.”

  “Oh, dear,” Tiffany’s mom tutted. “That’s too bad.”

  Tiffany tried to get a word in edgewise again, but Asia was too fast for her. “And Jordan said he saw you guys playing golf together a couple of days ago.”

  “Sweet baby Jesus, the gossip in this town!” Tiffany mangled a potato with the peeler. “I’m not dating him or anything.”

  Well, maybe not anything. Wow, Jericho was proficient with that tongue of his.

  “Jordan said he saw you guys hitting balls on the range together, too.”

  Tiffany glared at her, trying to squelch the line of discussion with intimidation. “Anybody can be on the driving range at any time. It doesn’t mean we were together.”

  “He also saw the two of you standing on the back deck, talking.”

  “Anybody can stand on the back deck and talk to people. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “And Latoya said she saw him walk you to your car.”

  “There is altogether too much gossip in this town. Didn’t Reverend Michael give a sermon just a few weeks ago about the evils of gossip?” Tiffany demanded.

  Asia said, “You guys must be paying the bag room staff too much, though. Jericho Parr is staying at the Newcastle Inn and Spa, in one of the suites. He’s had two massages in the last week. Martinique said he has an old shoulder injury and a shredded six-pack of abs. She said he looks like an athlete.”<
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  Now there was an image Tiffany didn’t need in her head. Jericho Parr had been invading her dreams enough as it was without imagining him with a freakin’ six-pack. “Are you spying on him? Because you shouldn’t be spying on him.”

  Asia continued, “I’ve seen him a few times because he eats supper in the café every day, and he is fine. I might start delivering his room service breakfast in the morning to get a better look at him. I mean, he is a large chunk of man. Are his eyes blue?”

  “Yeah.” Tiffany didn’t look up from her pile of potatoes.

  “He’s a white guy?” her mother asked.

  “Yeah.” This was all getting very far out of hand.

  Asia announced, “Maybe I should get a job at NGC if the bag room staff can afford to stay at the spa and eat their meals in the overpriced café. How much are you paying those guys, anyway?”

  “Well, it turns out I made a mistake,” Tiffany said, shooting eye-daggers at the potato in her hand. If cooking wrecked her manicure, she was going to be mad because she’d just gotten a fill the evening before. “It turns out that Jericho Parr isn’t working in the bag room.”

  All three of them turned and looked at her. Her mother even paused in her braiding.

  Imani asked, “Oh?”

  Asia asked, “Did he get fired from NGC already? Is that why he’s a bag boy at thirty years old, because he can’t keep a job?”

  “It turns out he never was bag room staff at all.” Tiffany stared at the potato she was peeling like she could laser the skin off if she stared at it hard enough. “It turns out he bought Newcastle Golf Club.”

  Much slamming and shouting filled the kitchen.

  “He bought the golf course?” Asia asked. “He wrote a check for the golf course like I buy cat food?”

  Imani mused, “How rich do you have to be to buy a whole golf course?”

  Tiffany ground her teeth and then said, “Our paychecks bounced. The club was insolvent, and they had a fire sale in the middle of the night. Jericho Parr bought it for a steal, and now he’s going to change everything because he wants it to turn a profit.”

  Tiffany’s mother frowned. “What will happen to your father’s membership?”

  “I don’t know, Momma. That’s the reason why I’m spending some time talking to him, to make sure he doesn’t screw it up. But I’m not dating him.”

  Imani cracked up. “A guy who can buy a country club? If you’re not going to date him, I will. You tell Jericho Parr that you’ve got a cousin who wants to meet him.”

  Tiffany ground her teeth again. That would never, ever happen. Never.

  She shook her head. That thought had not needed so much venom. Everything about this conversation was ridiculous, and she needed to give it all up to Jesus.

  Her mother shook her head. “‘It is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven,’” she quoted. Robin Jones had run Sunday School, Wednesday Bible study, and Saturday Witness at their Methodist church for twenty years on and off, whenever they’d lived in Newcastle. If she would’ve entered the military, she would have outranked Tiffany’s father within ten years. Mrs. Jones was a pillar of the Newcastle community, and she knew the importance of such social pillars in Newcastle. “Tiffany, I don’t think you should spend so much time with this man.”

  Tiffany huffed, “I told you I’m not dating him, so we don’t need to talk any more about him. Asia, how are things going with Scott?”

  Imani shouted, “Asia finally broke up with Scott! She caught him with his side chick at the spa’s café when she was waitressing one morning!”

  Chaos ensued.

  And it successfully diverted the conversation from Jericho Parr.

  Tiffany sighed in relief and peeled the next seven pounds of potatoes until she finally got her turn with her own mother to get her hair braided.

  St. Andrews and the Narragansett Club

  Tiffany

  Tiffany drove herself over to the Westerly House restaurant down by the shore and met Jericho there. He’d offered to pick her up, but storm shelter escapades aside, she hadn’t known him that long.

  Besides, they weren’t dating.

  That night was a business meeting to discuss the future of the Newcastle Golf Club, even if it was on a Saturday night in a restaurant so expensive that she had never been there, and even though it was less than an hour’s drive from where she’d grown up. Craig Aiello had taken his date for prom there, but his dad was the mayor of Newcastle and probably got a special rate or something.

  She drove into the parking lot expecting to find a spot and park her car, but a yellow valet sign reflected in her headlights.

  Oh yeah, of course, the Westerly House had valet parking, especially on a Saturday night at the beginning of tourist season.

  Tiffany stepped out of her car and told the pasty, pimply kid, his pale skin tinged with violet in the blue lights, “The keys are in the ignition.”

  The kid looked her up and down, from her fresh box braids and down her long, yellow silk maxi dress that covered her knee brace and brushed the toes of her ballet flats.

  A black zipper ran up the back of it as a fashion statement from the floor-length hem to the neckline below her shoulder blades.

  She told the valet again, slowly and clearly, “The keys are in the ignition.” Then she began to climb the stairs to the front door.

  Sure, she had what a lot of people would consider an old junker car because she wasn’t financially irresponsible enough to go out and buy a brand-new vehicle on payments just as soon as she’d graduated from college and got a job. Instead, she was saving up so she’d have a reasonable down payment rather than having to finance the whole thing. As a matter of fact, she kind of wanted to put half down on a new one, so she’d been saving her money. Plus, it was a lot cheaper to insure that old junker than a new car.

  And she’d been saving her money for other things, anyway.

  But that kid working the valet stand had been evaluating her, too.

  Even a teenager who was too stupid to buy a bottle of Clearasil was allowed to look Tiffany up and down, and judge her.

  Tiffany had made her way in the world and gone to college on a scholarship and graduated with highest honors, who could have been a professional athlete and made more money her first season than that townie was probably going to make the first two decades of his working life. She probably could’ve gotten into an MBA program at Wharton or Harvard and still might, depending on what she did next because her life plans had been scuttled. But still that adolescent working for tourist tips was allowed to judge her and decide whether or not she belonged at the Westerly House.

  She straightened her back and deliberately placed her foot in the middle of each step as she walked up toward the maître d’s podium because she didn’t want to give that kid the satisfaction of tripping.

  Behind herself, she heard the kid call out, “Hey! Are you sure you’re in the right place?”

  And there it was. Tiffany had been judged and found wanting.

  She turned, lifted her chin, and spoke very precisely. “We have reservations at eight.”

  And then she turned back and kept walking.

  The maître d’ raised one eyebrow as she approached, and he also looked her up and down with a blank expression except for a wrinkle beside his nose.

  And there was the next gatekeeper.

  Behind her, a different male voice, one much deeper but with a smile in its tone, called, “Tiffany!”

  The maître d’ looked over her head, and his expression smoothed into a more accommodating look.

  Tiffany turned, and Jericho was running up the steps toward her. He wore a dark blue suit and a white shirt with a pearl-gray tie, and his eyes picked up the blue he wore and seemed brighter from the contrast of his monochrome tie.

  Dang.

  Jericho had been cute at the club when he wore preppy golf attire, athletic trousers and a soft-collar
ed knit shirt. But Jericho Parr in a suit was something else entirely. The suit was tailored close to his torso, and the cut emphasized his broad shoulders and narrow waist and hips. His trousers skimmed his long legs.

  Whoever said that a well-cut suit was lingerie for men was right.

  His easy jog up the stairs did seem athletic, and the memory of his wet clothes shrink-wrapped to his six-pack abs and broad shoulders rose in her head.

  She had to stop thinking about his abs and athletic body, or else she was going to have to blame the April breeze and tell him she was cold.

  Jericho escorted her inside, and suddenly every waiter in the place was eager to take them to a table.

  Tiffany did not eye-roll.

  The waiter who showed them to a table held the chair for Tiffany, and she sat down as gracefully as she could, letting her long skirt flow around her like a princess taking her seat.

  Because Jericho was sitting at the small table with her now, every time he lifted one finger, the waitstaff came running. Her water glass was filled, bread appeared on the table, and everyone was simply thrilled to see them.

  It might not be fair, but Tiffany could sit back and enjoy it.

  Tiffany perused the menu in a hurry and ordered something on the low end, Chicken Kiev, because she didn’t want to be a gold digger for the evening.

  As soon as the restaurant staff left them alone, Jericho smiled at her, and his eyes lit up. “You look amazing.”

  Tiffany blinked and stared at her napkin in her lap and then wondered why the heck she was being so demure. People having business meetings weren’t coy. She’d dressed up for him, sure. Who wouldn’t dress for a Saturday evening meeting at an expensive restaurant? And she’d had her manicure filled. And she’d shaved her legs twice even though she was wearing a long skirt. But that didn’t mean it was for him. “Yeah, um, thanks.”

  Jericho continued, “You changed your hair. Those little gold bands at the ends are pretty, and the gold thread wrapping that one braid is beautiful.” His grin widened. “I don’t want to be too much of a nerd, but you could be a princess of Rivendell.”