Under Parr

by Blair Babylon

  Tiffany cracked up. “I’m an elf?”

  “Everyone knows the elves are the hotties in Middle Earth.”

  “You are a nerd!”

  He shrugged, still smiling. “I like movies.”

  Tiffany looked at her hands folded on top of the stark white napkin, and then she wondered what the heck she was doing again. “And I’ll bet you’ve known a lot of princesses.”

  “Not many. A couple of duchesses, too.”

  “I cannot believe your life. I cannot believe you actually know people who are princesses.”

  “None of them are as beautiful as you are.”

  His compliments were getting overwhelming. “Well, thanks. And you look great, too. You should wear a suit when you golf.”

  He snort-laughed. “Kowalski thinks far too much of his club as it is, and he’d probably insist that everyone start wearing suits if I did that. Even St. Andrews doesn’t insist on a tie anymore.”

  “Have you played St. Andrews?” St. Andrews, the “Old Course,” was one of the oldest and most prestigious golf courses in the world. It hosted the British Open major tournament every few years.

  Jericho shrugged. “A few times. Links golf is unforgiving, and the greens are just as burnt as they look on TV.”

  She laughed. “I’ve never played there. I’ve never been to Scotland.”

  Jericho kept looking right into her eyes. “I could get you on the course.”

  “And what would I have to do for that?” she asked him, tilting her head like she might be disapproving but tempering it with a smile.

  “Just come with me to Scotland. We can golf at St. Andrews and Royal St. George’s in the south of England. I don’t like Turnberry anymore. It’s gone sadly downhill in the last decade or so.”

  “That would be amazing. I can’t even imagine golfing at those places.”

  He said offhandedly, “They’re nice.”

  “I mean, those are like the Narragansett Club over in Rhode Island. No one can get on them. You have to be a member, and no one is a member.”

  He looked up at her. “Would you like to golf the Narragansett Club?”

  “Well, yeah,” she laughed. “I mean, who wouldn’t? It’s only the most exclusive golf course in the United States. I’ve heard it’s immaculate.”

  He nodded. “Yep.”

  “It’s harder to get on at the Narragansett Club than it is to play Augusta National,” where the Master’s Tournament is held every year.

  “I’ve heard that. How’s next weekend for you?”

  “Oh, I have back-to-back lessons booked the whole weekend. The weekend warriors need their spring tune-up so their buddies won’t laugh at them.”

  “What about the weekend after that, then? I can get an early tee time if you’d like. How about eight o’clock?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Sure, whatever.” She’d been fidgeting, lining up the bottoms of her silverware in a neat line parallel to the edge of the table, but she stopped. “Wait, you can get a tee time at the Narragansett Club?”

  Jericho’s smile turned a little more rigid. “My family has a membership.”

  Tiffany almost rose out of her seat. “You’re a member at Narragansett?”

  He nodded.

  The initiation fee at the Narragansett Club was rumored to be half a million dollars, and annual dues were high five figures, but no one knew for sure. The numbers weren’t published anywhere. Membership was by invitation only, and no one had been invited for forty years. The Shelter Harbor Country Club had been built because a bunch of disgruntled millionaires got tired of waiting generations to be offered membership at the Narragansett Club.

  It meant the Parr family must be old, old New England money, like running guns during the Revolutionary War, or worse. And it meant that Jericho wasn’t just some new-rich kid whose dad had made a few bucks in Beanie Baby speculation. He was elite high society, like debutante balls and trust funds and private planes and skyboxes at Madison Square Garden.

  No wonder he’d been playing poker with princes.

  She signaled the waiter back over. “I changed my mind. I’ll have the prime rib. And the shrimp scampi.”

  “Of course, madam.” The waiter sailed back to the kitchen.

  Jericho asked, “Do you want to golf at the Narragansett Club next weekend?”

  “Yeah, I do.” It would probably be her only chance in her whole life to play that course.

  “Saturday morning?”

  “Sure. Sounds good.”

  “I’ll set it up.”

  Tiffany waved her hands. “We should talk business. This is a business meeting, even if it is on a Saturday night at the Westerly House.”

  “Surely, we can mix business with a little—something else.”

  “Whether we do or not, we should discuss business first, and the business is the Newcastle Golf Club.”

  A waiter came over and showed Jericho a bottle of wine, and Jericho nodded. The waiter poured champagne into Jericho’s glass.

  Tiffany covered her glass with her palm. “None for me.”

  Jericho held up his hand like a stop sign, and the waiter stopped pouring the champagne. “Do you not drink? That’s fine.”

  “I never drink at all when I’m driving.”

  “Do you mind if I do? I’m not planning to drink a lot, and I have the liver and the bodyweight of a horse.”

  Tiffany chuckled at him. Yeah, Jericho could have a glass of wine or two and not be worried about driving. “I don’t care at all if you drink. I would have one if I wasn’t driving. Go ahead.”

  He waved to the waiter to continue pouring his champagne.

  Tiffany wished she had called a rideshare car instead of driving herself that night. The gold, effervescent wine and foil label looked like it must be excellent champagne.

  But even rideshare cars could be problematic, from getting one to pick her up to finding out too late that the driver was a creeper.

  When the waiter left, Jericho said, “So, Newcastle Golf Club.”

  “Yes, Newcastle Golf Club.” Broaching the subject seemed so hard. “So, how are you planning to gut it?”

  Jericho leaned back in his chair, though he was still smiling. “Gut it? I’m not going to gut it.”

  “But you said you need to increase revenues.”

  “Oh, yes. Revenues and overall value need to increase a lot.”

  “But why? If you change just enough to make a decent rate of return, do you have to scorch the Earth to wring every last dime out of it? Shouldn’t you keep what makes NGC special and different instead of making it a cookie-cutter golf course like every other track?”

  Jericho contemplated the bubbles in his champagne and then sipped it, obviously stalling. He turned the glass, watching the effervescence.

  “NGC is a special place with a special history,” she said. “Couldn’t you just play up that angle in advertising?”

  Jericho squinted his eyes and tilted his head, almost a wince. “It needs to increase in value more than that.”

  “Look, I was a business major. I understand that businesses need to turn a profit or else they are actually charities, but I also understand that you shouldn’t change what makes a business special. Repeat customers are the best kind of customers because they require zero advertising. They’re pure profit. For NGC, that’s our returning members every year. If we drive them away, NGC will fall farther into the red.”

  “Good point,” he said, mulling it over.

  “We only have a twenty percent turnover per year. That means we’re keeping eighty percent of our members year-over-year, and half of our drop-outs are because they die or go into assisted living somewhere else.”

  “That’s interesting.” A frown line appeared between his eyes. “What’s the average age of the club?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. The median age is probably seventy-five or so. We’re heavy on the older people.”

  “Huh,” Jericho said.

  Uh-oh. “What�
��s huh?”

  “That’s concerning. It means that more members than I’d anticipated will be resigning one way or another over the next decade or so. That’s a number we’ll have to overcome. What else?”

  Tiffany wound up for her pitch. “We’re respected. We have a good reputation as a welcoming place, not a snooty country club.”

  He nodded. “Okay.”

  “We’re a pillar of the community. Everyone has their wedding receptions and campaign fundraisers there.”

  “That’s something we can leverage. Why didn’t you get your MBA?” he asked her.

  “That’s not important. We’re talking about—”

  “No, it is important. You make good points. You have good business sense. You graduated from a good university summa cum laude with a bachelor’s in business and should have walked straight into an MBA program. So why didn’t you?”

  She hadn’t told him that. “How did you know what honors I graduated with?”

  He shrugged. “I read your CV.”

  “You mean my résumé?”

  He shrugged. “I spent a lot of my school years in Switzerland. Yes, your résumé.”

  “Looking up my résumé is kind of intrusive,” she said.

  He shook his head with his eyes closed. “I looked into the club files and read everyone’s résumé, not just yours. I had to know who I was working with. It was only after I read your résumé that I googled you and dug into your background some more. I have to say, Tiffany, you’re astonishingly overqualified to be an assistant pro at a backwater club.”

  “No, I’m not,” she muttered.

  “If this were one of Last Chance’s usual business ventures, I would intervene in the company for two or three months, maximum, and I’d train you to run the place. I’d let you decide whether you wanted to be the head pro or the general manager or whatever hybrid of those roles you wanted to call yourself, and then I’d pay you enough that you wouldn’t run off to that MBA program you obviously should be enrolled in. Something about you doesn’t add up. Why are you an assistant golf instructor in this Podunk town in the wilds of Connecticut? Was there a family situation or something?”

  “My family’s fine. Leave my family out of this.” She bit off the words in her mouth as she spoke.

  He was looking right at her, his gaze level and serious. “But the real question is, why you aren’t out on the LPGA Tour as a professional? Because after leading your team to victory at the NCAA Division One Tournament and then winning the Ladies’ Amateur in the same season, you should have been offered a spot on the LPGA Tour.”

  “They did. I blew out my knee,” Tiffany blurted, and she immediately regretted it and yet could not stop talking. “A week after I won the Ladies’ Amateur, I was out on the course at Tennessee State, practicing—”

  “Of course, you were.”

  “—and my right foot slipped when I was teeing off on the eighth hole. I’d been fighting injuries on it for years. I must’ve had a rock or something under my left shoe, and I felt everything tear inside my leg.”

  His blue eyes narrowed. “How are you walking?”

  “I wear a brace. I’m wearing it right now. I wear it all the time because if I don’t, I can’t even stand up for very long.”

  He nodded. “That was the Velcro under your slacks.”

  When he’d taken it off of her before he’d— “With the brace, I can walk and golf, at least some. I can play eighteen holes. I can give lessons. But I can’t compete.”

  “Why didn’t you have it fixed? Most surgeons should be able to fix that with a scope. What would that have been, six weeks recovery time?”

  “I talked to two different surgeons, and they both said I didn’t need it.”

  “Didn’t need it?” He leaned forward in his chair and peered at her. “You’re wearing a brace so you can walk. You need it.”

  “They wouldn’t do it. The first guy wouldn’t even order an MRI. The second guy glanced at the labs and shrugged at me. He said he didn’t see anything worth fixing. A friend of mine heard about a doctor in New York that some baseball players go to. I’m planning to try there.”

  “You need a sports medicine orthopedic specialist, preferably one with golf expertise. Who did Tiger’s leg?”

  “He retired and he was in Texas, and I can’t afford to go doctor shopping,” she admitted. “I aged out of my dad’s Tricare when I graduated from college, so I’m on NGC’s health care plan. You have to pay the co-pay to just walk into an office. I’m saving up so I can pay the co-pays and deductible next year and then, hopefully, find a specialist who can work on it.”

  “You shouldn’t have to wait. I don’t know why you’re not on the club’s executive health insurance plan.”

  Tiffany paused. “What’s that?”

  “The board voted five years ago to purchase a blue-chip health insurance policy for the board members and senior staff. Kowalski is on it. Why aren’t you?”

  Tiffany blinked. A hot flush ran over her skin. “I don’t know. My health insurance is through the club, though. Are you sure that’s not it?”

  “You must have the minimal policy if you have co-pays at all. That one has a high deductible and a low cap. You’re full-time and should be on the blue-chip plan. You will be, starting Monday.”

  “You can’t just do that. There’s like, enrollment periods.”

  He raised one sandy brown eyebrow at her. “I’ll call the company Monday morning. You’ll be covered by lunchtime. After that, you’ll have no co-pays or deductible.”

  “Wow.” Money could move mountains.

  “Who did you see for that leg of yours?”

  Tiffany told him the names.

  “Never heard of them. I’ll call the guy who did my shoulder and get some referrals. It’s ridiculous that you’re walking around with a sports injury when you shouldn’t be.” His tone was a little testy like someone had been talking nonsense at him, and his frown deepened. “It’s ridiculous that this wasn’t fixed when it happened and that you’ve been waiting a year and a half for medical care.”

  Tiffany said, “I’d appreciate your help.”

  He looked up at her, his glance sharp like he was watching for a reaction, and then he sighed. “Sorry. Growing up in Europe spoiled me. Over there, people have access to health care. Specialists would have fixed your leg, and you could have immediately gone on to have the career you were meant for. You wouldn’t have been walking around in pain because your place of work neither gave you the proper insurance nor paid you enough to afford the difference. You could have concentrated on healing instead of how you were going to pay the doctors.” His lips tightened when he said that last part.

  “Thanks,” she said, watching him.

  He shook his head like he was clearing thoughts out and was smiling when he turned back. When he caught her eye, he tilted his head. “What?”

  “I don’t know why you’re doing this. I mean, I was planning to ‘pay up’ anyway.”

  Jericho’s shoulders lowered, and that expressive eyebrow of his cocked down again. “That’s not why. You’ll be on the exec insurance plan Monday by lunch, but all the full-time staff will be enrolled starting next month. That’s how I do business, but I also think you shouldn’t have to find a sucker for a boss to get adequate health care. But we don’t need to keep talking about it. Here’s our salad.”

  While they ate, they talked about other things, like what it was like growing up in Newcastle and going to NFA and then Tennessee State, and what it was like flying alone to Switzerland at six years old to go to boarding school.

  At some point while they were eating their salads and telling silly stories about themselves like the time she and her cousins had used beet juice and squid ink to dye an opposing high school’s ram mascots red and black as a prank, Jericho rested his hand near the center of the table. They talked for a few more minutes, and then he rolled his hand over, fingers up.

  Tiffany had been bracing herself with her
elbows on the tablecloth, and without even thinking about it, she reached farther toward the center of the table, weaving her arms between the salad plates.

  The candle that had been in the middle of the table had been pushed to the side so it wouldn’t hinder them.

  When Jericho was making a point, something about golf courses in Portugal, he flipped his hand over again to rest his fingers on hers.

  And she slid her hand farther under his.

  And then they were holding hands in the middle of the table, her fingers entwined with his warm, strong ones.

  They talked more for a few minutes like that, just holding hands, leaning forward. He looked down a couple of times and then looked back up at her, flashing those blue eyes of his. A part of her brain started discussing colorism, but she shut it down because Jericho Parr flirting was so sexy that she wondered if he had a room in the Westerly House for the night or precisely what she should say to invite him back to her apartment.

  He looked down at her lips, back up at her eyes, and smiled.

  She was leaning forward on her elbows, breathless, and blinking too much, and she wanted to leave the Westerly House right then.

  The waiter brought their main dishes, and they had to move their arms to let him place the plates in front of them.

  And then Tiffany realized that they had stopped talking about Newcastle Golf Club a long time ago.

  This night wasn’t supposed to be a date, but it wasn’t supposed to be a quid pro quo to get her to stop talking about the club, either. She hadn’t come to this supper with Jericho to get something for herself, like a super-premium platinum health insurance plan to pay for her knee, in exchange for her giving up defending NGC’s place in the community.

  The transactional nature of her silence weighed on her as she ate some of the best prime rib she’d ever eaten in her life. Seriously, the slab of meat melted like room-temperature butter under her fork.

  And those au gratin potatoes were spectacular au gratin potatoes. She could tell those potato slices had started the day as a fresh potato, not as hard, dried chips in a box.