85 lines
8.8 KiB
Plaintext
85 lines
8.8 KiB
Plaintext
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
|
\f0\fs24 The eighteenth green on the Pines was elevated slightly above the fairway, and Andy Hayes stood just off the fringe with Alex Carpenter and watched his daughter climb down into the bunker with the careful, deliberate movement of a person keeping something tightly leashed.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
He'd seen that walk before. Knew it the way he knew the particular sound an engine made when something was about to go wrong.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
"Rough lie?" Alex said quietly.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
"Plugged." Andy kept his eyes on her. "Ball went in soft sand on the steep face."\par
|
|
\par
|
|
Alex made a low sound that wasn't quite a wince. He understood bunkers. They both did.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
Bobby stood on the far side of the green, leaning on his wedge with his arms folded over the grip, two feet from a birdie putt he hadn't bothered to mark because there was nothing to discuss about it. He'd striped a seven-iron from a hundred and sixty-two yards into a two-mile-an-hour crosswind and put it exactly where he'd aimed it, and the ball had tracked to the hole and stopped close enough that a moderately talented four-year-old could have made the putt. Andy had seen it happen and had felt the small, involuntary contraction in his chest that a father feels when the outcome his child needs begins to slip away.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
That had been four minutes ago.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
The afternoon had gone wrong in pieces, which was somehow worse than going wrong all at once. She'd played the front nine at two-under on the Palms \u8212? same as the morning \u8212? and stood one up at the turn, just as she'd predicted, the shoulder adjustment Bobby had given her at lunch paying dividends on the fourth and sixth holes where she'd taken two birdies and gone ahead by two, and Andy had watched her from the cart path and felt the clean uncomplicated pleasure of watching someone do something genuinely difficult and make it look like less than it was.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
Then the back nine.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
The heat, mostly. Ninety-four degrees in direct sun on a course with no shade to speak of, and she'd sweated through her shirt by the eleventh and her swing had shortened again \u8212? he could see it happening, the way a clock runs slow in cold weather \u8212? and Bobby had birdied twelve and thirteen and the match had leveled. Then the sixteenth, which Andy would rather not have watched but had watched anyway, because that was the arrangement. You stood there. You watched all of it.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
She'd pushed her drive right on sixteen and the ball had found the rough, not deep rough but wiry coastal rough that gripped the club like a hand, and she'd taken her medicine and laid up and then come up short with the approach and three-putted from forty feet, the last putt a straight two-footer that she'd pushed, and he'd heard the small hard sound she made through her nose when she missed it. Not a word. Just the sound.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
Double bogey. One down.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
She'd birdied seventeen on pure aggression, a career drive and a nine-iron that came out of the sun and landed soft and the birdie putt from eighteen feet that she'd read and rolled perfectly, and she'd walked off that green all even again with everything still open and the whole day still salvageable and Andy had thought: there it is, that's my girl, because that was the part that was entirely hers, the thing he hadn't taught her and couldn't have, the capacity to absorb damage and come back through it.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
And then the eighteenth.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
Her iron had come off slightly \u8212? he knew it the moment she struck it, something in the shoulder, the heat doing its slow work \u8212? and it had faded right instead of drawing and found the bunker face, and the ball had buried. He'd watched it happen from the cart path and had said nothing and continued saying nothing because there was nothing to say, and Alex had stood beside him and also said nothing, which Andy appreciated.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
Now she was in the sand with a lie that a touring professional would have been grateful just to get on the green, and she needed to hole it.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
Andy crossed his arms and watched.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
She stood over the ball for a long time. He could see her reading it, cataloging the ugly geometry of the situation \u8212? the steep face, the plugged lie, the distance to the hole, Bobby's ball sitting two feet away making the whole thing worse by its simple, cheerful proximity. She gripped the sand wedge and settled her feet and the set of her jaw was visible even from where he stood, that particular expression she'd had since she was nine years old and someone told her something couldn't be done.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
He'd always loved that about her. It had also given him more gray hair than the job.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
She took the club back and came through it hard, a full committed swing, the sand exploding out in a heavy wet sheet that caught the afternoon light and came apart in the air, and the ball jumped up out of the crater with the desperate trajectory of something that had been buried and was suddenly free.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
For one moment \u8212? one brief, irrational moment \u8212? Andy thought it might go in. The flight was high and the ball was tracking and Bobby, on the far side of the green, had straightened slightly, watching, the grin gone from his face for the first time all afternoon.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
The ball landed four feet past the hole and ran.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
It ran another two feet and stopped.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
Andy breathed out.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
Six feet, roughly. Slightly above the hole. A putt she made eight times out of ten in practice and six out of ten in competition and today, this afternoon, in ninety-four degrees after seventeen holes of emotional labor, the odds were whatever they were and he didn't want to calculate them.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
She climbed out of the bunker and Alex said something under his breath that Andy didn't hear. Bobby stayed where he was, arms back over the wedge grip, and when she came up onto the green he took a step back and gave her the whole thing, the way you did. The grin was still absent. He was watching her the way Andy was watching her, with a different kind of attention than the match had required up to this point.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
She marked her ball and cleaned it and replaced it and read the putt from both sides, and Andy watched her read it and knew from the set of her shoulders exactly when she'd decided on the line because that was how she'd always been, the decision arriving and then the doubt running in behind it, and what separated her from most golfers her age was that she didn't let the doubt change anything.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
She set up and stroked it.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
The ball rolled true for four feet and then broke slightly \u8212? a half-inch, maybe less \u8212? and caught the right edge of the cup and spun out.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
Six inches past.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
He heard her exhale. Heard it from where he was standing.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
She didn't move immediately. She stood over the ball with the putter at her side and her head down, and Andy stayed exactly where he was and let her have it, the six seconds or ten seconds or whatever it needed to be, because you had to let it land fully before you could carry it.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
Then she picked up the ball.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
She walked to Bobby, who had come forward now, his putter loose in one hand, the grin returning quietly to the corners of his mouth the way it would, the way you couldn't help. He put his hand out and she shook it \u8212? a real handshake, not a tap \u8212? and she said something to him that Andy couldn't hear and Bobby nodded once, serious, and that was the concession and the end of the match and the whole long day of it.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
Then she picked up her ball and dropped it into the water hazard alongside the green with a clean deliberate motion, no windup, just a short underhand toss, and the ball hit the surface and vanished, and she turned and walked off the green without looking at anyone.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
Bobby watched her go. He shook his head once, the grin wider now but something else in it, something that wasn't mockery. He looked at Andy across the green and Andy met his eyes and Bobby said, "She had it the whole way."\par
|
|
\par
|
|
"I know she did," Andy said.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
He looked at Alex, who raised an eyebrow the small amount it needed to be raised, and they walked toward the cart.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
In the truck on the way home she sat in the passenger seat with her bag stowed and her shoes changed and her jaw set in the same line it had been on the eighteenth green and Andy drove south on Federal Highway and let the silence be what it was. The air conditioning ran. The light was going amber in the west.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
She knew the numbers as well as he did. The best in the world won fewer than one in four. She knew it the way she knew everything about the game \u8212? completely and without comfort, because it didn't help, not today, not ever on the day itself.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
He drove. She looked out the window.\par
|
|
\par
|
|
He let her fume.
|
|
} |