Worth the Drive

by Mara Jacobs

“I’ve asked Katie – ”

  “We’re working that out,” Katie interrupted him.

  He felt disappointment creeping down his back and then it was replaced by Katie’s soft hand, rubbing up and down his spine, then resting on his arm. “There are lots of logistics to figure out. Where we’ll live after the baby. How often the baby and I will travel with Darío. I have a house in the U.P., he has one in Spain. All that stuff needs to be worked out.”

  Franny nodded, seemingly accepting Katie’s answer.

  Darío was not sure he did. He was thrilled that Katie spoke of their future together with no qualms, but she didn’t mention marriage, had in fact cut him off knowing full well he was going to mention it.

  But, he had agreed not to push her on it. On anything, really. And she’d willingly told Franny that they’d be together as a family, they were just working out the details. Logistics, she called them.

  It felt to Darío that more than geographical details needed to be settled between them, but he finished his dinner in silence, happy, and looking forward to being alone with Katie again.

  Akron went well. On the course, anyway. Off the course, Akron went very, very well.

  Darío didn’t come near his course record, but had a respectable showing placing in the top ten again. He had all but locked up being eligible for the Tour Championship, the last tournament of the season, played in November. Only the top thirty players from the money list got in.

  They moved on to Connecticut. He skipped his practice round on Tuesday and they spent the entire day in bed.

  Their next stop would be Boston and then Darío wouldn’t play in the US again until the Tour Championship, electing to skip the lesser tournaments that filled the schedule from September to November. That would be the end of the trial period that they’d discussed when they’d come to their agreement of Katie traveling with Darío.

  Katie wasn’t sure what would happen after Boston. Would they head to the U.P.? Finally tell her parents about the baby? Would Darío want to head back to Spain? She knew from Binky that was what he usually did.

  She wasn’t sure what to suggest. She only knew she didn’t want to be away from him now that they were sharing a bed.

  More than a bed. Now that they were sharing the beginning of a life together.

  In Connecticut, Darío had his usual Thursday night dinner with Binky. Katie elected to stay at the hotel and get some work done on her newest article. Darío was going to bring her back a salad from wherever he and Binky ended up for dinner. Maybe he’d forget the milk.

  Her latest article was a feature on one of the players whose child was autistic. The nomadic life of a family on the road posed some unique challenges for the player, his wife and their children. It was a heartbreaking piece on the struggle these parents felt about being on the road or not being together. The player was one who annually struggled to keep his Tour card.

  Their story tugged at Katie and she assumed it would also tug at readers’ hearts.

  She put the finishing touches on the piece and jotted herself a couple of notes on things she wanted to double check with the player’s wife as well as the call she wanted to make to an autism center.

  She applauded her timing as Darío walked in the hotel room just as she put her laptop away and sat down on the small couch in the living area of the room.

  “How was dinner? Did you guys figure out the game plan for tomorrow?” she asked. Though Darío’s round today of five under par wouldn’t need much tinkering with.

  He nodded. “Sí. I won’t do too much differently, but will go with my three wood instead of driver on the fifth hole.”

  Katie nodded agreeing with his and Binky’s decision.

  Darío brought Katie back the salad she’d requested as well as the dreaded milk she’d force herself to drink. He leaned over and gave her a quick kiss. It didn’t satisfy either of them and he zeroed in for a longer, hungrier taste.

  Finally he broke away, much to her disappointment, and pointing to the food, said, “Eat.”

  She noticed he also had a small package, which he tossed to her as he set out her food on the coffee table in front of her. The bag landed softly on her lap and she looked up at Darío questioningly.

  “For you,” he said. “Well, actually, for the both of us, but you can have the first look.” He seemed embarrassed and Katie gave him a small smile, which he returned with a shrug and an “it’s nothing” brush of his hand.

  Curious, she opened the package to find a baby name book. Touched by his thoughtfulness, she decided not to mention that she already had this same version at home as well as three other baby name books all ragged-eared from use.

  He didn’t need to know that. Besides, the names she and Ron had tossed around for years wouldn’t necessarily be the names she and Darío would choose. It seemed almost tacky to her to consider naming Darío’s child a name she and Ron had decided on. Somehow, she didn’t think Darío would go for Ron Jr.

  Instead, she thanked him. She patted the seat beside her on the couch and started to prepare her dinner. “Tell me what names you like while I eat,” she said.

  He sat beside her, took her hair and brought it to the back of her neck and stroked it down her back. She loved it when he did that. It felt both comforting and sexy.

  “I don’t really have any idea about names,” he said.

  “You’ve never thought about what you’d like to name a child?” she asked as she poured dressing on her salad and took the plastic knife and fork out of their cellophane wrap. She’d been thinking about it since she was fourteen.

  He shook his head no.

  “Well, we could do the traditional route,” she said, “something Biblical or a family name.”

  He seemed to think that over. “We could do that. Is there a family name that you would like?” he asked.

  She chuckled. “I come from a Finnish family, remember? There aren’t too many Finnish first names that would go well with Luna. I’d never saddle a son with Urho Luna.”

  He smiled at the thought and she warmed at the sight of his lips turned up in that sly way. “Perhaps not,” he conceded.

  “What about you? Any family names you want to continue down the line.” The moment she saw his smile fade to a grim line she regretted her words. He was probably thinking about his father – or lack of one. Quickly trying to bring back the lighter moment, she said, “Or, we could go the celebrity route. You are, after all a celebrity.” At his raised brows she added, “At least in the golfing world.”

  “What, exactly, is the celebrity way of naming a child?”

  “Sometimes an inanimate object, like Apple,” she said. She laughed at his horrified look. “Or named after the place where the child was conceived. Just look at David Beckham and Posh Spice’s Brooklyn.” Their minds went back to Texas. Katie could see Darío’s thoughts were the same as hers. “Irving Luna,” they said together, laughing.

  He nudged the milk toward her. “Drink,” he said, still laughing. He got up and headed toward the bathroom.

  She took a sip of milk. “So, Irving for a boy,” she teased. “We haven’t discussed girls’ names.”

  He turned toward her, his hand on the doorknob. “Well, that does not need to be discussed.” At her questioning look, he smiled and said, “She has been Peaches to me from the very first.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  One minute you’re bleeding. The next minute you’re hemorrhaging.

  The next minute you’re painting the Mona Lisa.

  - Mac O’Grady, golfer, on a typical round of golf.

  The next week was a whirlwind of days on the courses and nights in bed with Darío. She still was klutzy with Darío in bed, but she got better. And they practiced. A lot.

  Their bodies relaxed, legs intertwined, arms around each other. Katie’s head on Darío’s chest. Hotel sounds of doors slamming and the occasional room service cart wheeling down the hallway were the only things they heard.

  “Tell
me about your father,” Katie said. She felt Darío’s chest stiffen under her hand. “Or, what you remember about your father.” His whole body tensed. She gently rubbed her hand across his chest, trying to infuse some of her warmth into him. “Please,” she whispered. She heard his sigh, felt his soft breath float across her hair.

  “There’s not much to tell. I remember nothing because he was never a part of our lives,” Darío said. Katie heard the leashed control in his voice. She hadn’t heard that tone since the night she’d gone to Memphis and asked Darío to give up all rights to his child.

  Because of their child, she forged on. “Never? He didn’t leave you and your mother when you were young? Weren’t there any pictures of him around?”

  His arm tightened around her, then loosened, his hand soothing her skin. “You don’t understand. It wasn’t a case of my parents being together and then my father leaving. They were never together. My mother…” He sighed again, heavier, making Katie’s hair flutter across her nose. Darío brushed it back behind her ear.

  “When I was older, when I wanted to find out who my father was…I asked the women where my mother worked. They said they’d never seen her as much as speak to any men in the club, let alone spend enough time with one to become pregnant.”

  “Maybe they were protecting her?”

  Darío snorted. “Not those old bitches. They hated my mother. They would have loved to tell me who she was whore to.”

  Katie gasped. “Is that what you think? That your mother is a whore?” She couldn’t fathom the thought. Her own mother seemed so…asexual to Katie, as any mother should.

  Darío’s legs shifted under her knee. “No, no of course not. That is what they thought. My mother is a saint. She raised me alone. She did the best she could. When she saw I had a talent for golf, she moved heaven and earth to find a way for me to play. She loved me and fed me, and in her eyes, I was no bastard.

  “But, when I was in my teens, I didn’t know what to think. No one appreciates their parents as teenagers.”

  Katie thought of the fights she and her mother had when she was a teen. The same fights Katie’s sisters-in-law were having with their teens now. “Yes, of course. What about your mother’s family? Were they any help to her while you were growing up?”

  She felt his chin against her as he shook his head. “No. It wasn’t the dark ages, but it was still a very conservative, small resort area then. My grandparents told my mother she could go away to have the child, give it up for adoption and then come home. My grandparents are strict Catholics. Of course, abortion was out of the question.”

  “Thank goodness,” Katie said. She couldn’t imagine a life without Darío in it. The magnitude of that thought hit her full force. She pushed it away. Later. She’d deal with those thoughts later. Darío was opening up to her and she didn’t want to miss a word of it.

  “Yes, though there were times, very few, but times when I thought another choice would have been the better one. And I let my poor mother know it, too.”

  Katie tried to ease his obvious guilt. “Hey, what kid doesn’t shout ‘I wish I’d never been born’ a couple of times at their parents.”

  “Really? All children do that?”

  “Of course. And ours will too. No matter how much love and security you give a child, they have to exert their independence at some point. They don’t know how, and that’s when they push you away. If you’ve done your job right, though, they always come back to you.”

  Darío didn’t say anything, deep in thought, deep in remembering. “You’re close with your mother now, right?” Katie asked.

  “Sí, very close.”

  She brought him back to his story. “So, when she wouldn’t give you up for adoption, what happened?”

  Darío placed his hand over his eyes, as if trying to hide from the memories of a time he was too young to possibly remember. “She was working as a cook at the country club. San Barria is a resort town. Businessmen come to the area for conferences and to golf on our courses. She continued on at the country club, even though she took much abuse from her co-workers. The wife of the greenskeeper kept me during the days until I was old enough to go to school.

  “Mamá would come home every evening smelling of wonderful herbs and saffron. Sergio, the greenskeeper would come home at the same time. He smelled of grass and the outdoors.” Darío chuckled. “To me they both smelled like heaven.”

  “So that’s how you learned to golf? You grew up at the course?”

  “Sí. Both Sergio and his wife, and my mother and I had small cottages that were just a pathway away from the course. In the evenings, Sergio would take me with him while he walked the course one more time. When I was old enough, he brought me some old clubs that had been discarded by a member. Sergio cut them down for my size.”

  Katie took Darío’s hand from his eyes, kissed the calloused knuckles, the skin smoother around the fingers where he’d worn tape during his round. “And the rest is history.”

  She sensed, more than saw, his smile. “Not quite. But it became obvious when I was a teen that I had a natural ability for the game.”

  “I’ll say,” Katie teased. “Three majors to prove it.”

  He kissed the top of her head, and she burrowed in deeper to his warmth. “Sergio found ways to get me into tournaments. The amateur system in Europe is a very good building block. I had offers to attend college here in the States, and many of my peers were going. But I wanted to turn pro. Needed to turn pro.”

  “For the money. For your mother,” Katie said quietly.

  “Sí,” came the just as quiet answer.

  She didn’t want to cause him any pain, and she thought that her next question might, but, in for a penny…she figured. She also had selfish motives. Whoever Darío’s father was, he was also the biological grandfather to her child. Though the man had certainly gave up every right he had to claim Darío as his son, not to mention his grandchild, there were genetic health issues to wonder about.

  “In all this time, your mother never told you who your father was? You never asked?”

  “I asked all the time when I was younger. When I was very little she told me ‘Your father is someone who loves you very much but cannot be with you’. When I was old enough to question her further on that, she said he lived very far away. When I would not be put off with that she would become very upset, asking if she wasn’t a good mother, why couldn’t I be happy with just her, things like that. After a while, I learned not to ask.”

  “The poor woman, it must have been so hard for her.”

  “As an adult I saw that, and tried to make up for the hardships she endured for me. I tried to make up for the child who brought her pain when pestering her about his father.”

  “But that’s a natural reaction, for a child to ask those questions. Did you ever guess who your father might be? What about this Sergio?”

  Darío laughed. “Sergio was an old man then who only had eyes for his wife. He’s a very old man now, who still only has eyes for his wife.” He was quiet, thoughtful. “Of course I guessed. I measured my looks against every man who worked at the resort. Every man in church on Sundays. I never saw anyone look at me or my mother with any kind of deep emotion. That was when I vowed things would be different with me. No child of mine would ever spend their days looking at the men around him, looking to see if he has someone’s nose or eyes. Even if it meant never having children at all.”

  “You never wanted children?” She was surprised. Apart from the odd circumstances, Darío seemed to be embracing the idea of fatherhood fairly easily. And she’d noticed his naturalness with the children of friends on the Tour.

  “Sí, I wanted them. I just thought I’d have a few more things…settled before I had them.”

  “What kind of things?” The man was a stand-out in his career, had wealth for his, his children’s, and his children’s children’s lifetimes. What more needed to be…settled?

  “I wanted to be invited to the ca
pital by the president of Spain. I wanted to have my picture on the cover of Sports Illustrated again. I wanted to…” his voice trailed off.

  Puzzled, Katie said, “I’m surprised. Granted we haven’t known each other long, but the time we’ve been together has been pretty…revealing.”

  His hand stroked down her arm and across her breast as if to emphasize her point. “Why are you surprised? You yourself have commented on my drive.”

  “To compete. To win. Yes.”

  “To get on the cover of magazines, to be invited to the capital, to do these things you must win.”

  “So, the winning is only a means to the fame?” She felt his chin as he nodded. “But you’re such a private man. And you’re so intelligent. Wanting something as fleeting and vapid as fame surprises me.”

  “You think I’m shallow to want my accomplishments to be known?”

  An image of Ron, skating across the ice after a goal, his helmet off to his adoring fans skittered through Katie’s mind. “No, I think you’re the least shallow man I know. That’s why I’m so surprised.”

  The room was quiet. No outside noises. No inside ones either. Finally Darío spoke, his voice no more than a whisper. If Katie’s ear weren’t just below his mouth, she never would have heard him. “I want him to know. I want him to see.”

  She felt the tension running through him, though where he touched her, he was gentle. “Your father,” she said, seeing into his pain, seeing into his soul.

  “Si, my father. I want him to see that I did not need him. That I am a success without him. That I was better raised by a woman alone and a greenskeeper than by him.”

  Another moment passed, Katie smoothed her hand across his chest, his arms, his belly, trying to take some of the pain onto herself. An image of Darío on the course, focused, determined to win came to her.

  “That’s who you’re looking for. In the galleries. You’re looking for him, aren’t you?”

  He shuddered, his stomach hollowing beneath her hand. He rubbed his hand across his face, wiping away…what? Katie wondered. “Sí. I suppose I am. Of course if my father ever were in a gallery, I’d have no way of knowing. Sometimes I see someone with a likeness to me and I think ‘Is that him? Has he come to watch his son win?’ Pathetic, eh?”