Ace! The Golf King's Reconquest novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: The Receipt
Holt refuses the entry fee, pays the hospital bill with the bet money, and finds his old clubs and his wife's daisy marker; Bryn's truck is in his lane at night.
"No," Holt said.
Bryn kept the phone up between them.
"You haven't heard the offer."
"I don't need to hear it."
"I don't take eight hundred dollars from my boss."
"I'm not your boss anymore," Bryn said. "You got fired an hour ago."
She said it flatly.
Holt looked at the receipt.
His own name sat at the top of it, spelled right.
"You paid this at six this morning," he said. "Before the cameras."
"The entry window opened at six."
"Why?"
Bryn shrugged one shoulder, the left, the one that did not move as far as the right.
"It closes Friday and I was tired of waiting."
Poppy had fallen asleep against Holt's collar with her boots swinging.
He tucked the receipt back into Bryn's hand and walked to the old pickup he drove to work.
"It's refundable until Friday," she called after him.
He did not turn around.
The hospital billing office was a window in a basement hallway, with a plastic chair and a number machine.
Holt sat in the chair with Poppy asleep on his lap and thirty hundred-dollar bills in his front pocket.
The woman at the window took the money and counted it twice.
He gave her another hundred out of his own wallet for the balance.
She printed him a page that said the account was closed.
He folded it into a square and held it in his fist all the way to the truck.
It had taken two years to see that number come to zero.
He felt no better than before.
At six that evening Mavis Corbett pulled into the lane behind the grounds cottage with a covered dish on the passenger seat.
She was sixty-one and carried herself with brisk purpose.
Her cardigan pockets were full of crackers.
She gave one to Poppy without a word the second Holt lifted her out of the car seat.
"I heard," Mavis said. "Everybody in West Ashley heard."
"Heard what?"
"My neighbor's grandson was on the terrace with his phone."
"He put it up with a song."
She said it dry and flat, and she went into the kitchen and began taking plates out of cupboards.
Holt watched her back.
She had been the only person in the world who had not gone quiet around him in the past two years.
But she had never asked about golf.
Not once, at a dinner table or a birthday, or a Christmas.
"I'm out of the cottage by Sunday," he said.
"I know that too."
"There's a room at my house."
"I know. Thank you."
She turned the oven on and stood with her hand on the dial.
"Did you hit it the way you used to?"
He thought about it.
"No. It felt better."
Mavis nodded, but she did not look at him.
After supper he put Poppy down in the portable crib.
Then he went to the hall closet for a box of her winter clothes.
Behind the box was a bag.
It was a black and white staff bag, scuffed along the bottom and still holding twelve clubs.
He had not opened the closet door in a year and a half, and he had not been able to throw it away.
He ran a thumb along the leather strap.
In the side pocket was a cardboard sleeve of balls, a half-eaten roll of tape, and one round metal ball marker.
It had a daisy painted on it in white and yellow enamel.
Carys had bought it at a craft fair in Savannah the spring before they were married.
She had said a champion needed a flower to remember what he was playing for.
He turned it in his fingers and the paint caught the kitchen light.
"Put that away," Mavis said from the doorway.
Her voice was calm.
She was holding a dish towel, and her knuckles had gone white on it.
"She would have wanted you to play," she said. "She would have told you to go."
"Would she?"
"Of course she would."
Mavis folded the dish towel in half and then in half again.
"I never could," she said, and went back to the kitchen.
He did not know what she meant.
He stood in the hall with the daisy in his hand until the faucet started.
At ten, after Mavis had taken Poppy home with her for the night, he sat on the porch step in the dark.
Headlights came down the lane and stopped.
It was the green utility truck.
Bryn left the engine running and rolled down her window.
"Here's the deal," she said, without hello. "Call it a bet, not a favor."
"I put in eight hundred, and you pay me back when you win."
"Win and you cut my lawn for life."
Holt looked at her through the dusty glass.
She was wearing the same wet boots as the morning, and her face looked like she had not eaten.
"And if I don't win?"
"Then you don't," Bryn said. "But you know you will."
She put the truck in gear and rolled out of the lane before he could say anything back.
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