Chapter 23
Harrison entered the house through the mudroom to a surprising silence. He expected to hear arguing or, at the very least, cackling. He approached the kitchen warily, hoping to find they’d gone out rather than discovering them all murdered. It really was hard to explain the silence.
No one was in the kitchen. But nothing was disturbed—the nutcrackers were still standing sentry. The mistletoe was still hanging from the arch. “Silent Night” was drifting through the rooms.
He moved through the kitchen and into the living room. There, the mystery was solved. The Posse, minus Barb, was standing at a window, along with Amy’s brother. Their attention was on something outside. No one noticed his entrance. “Hello?”
Carol whipped around. “Sssh,” she said, waving him down, as if he was speeding toward them.
“They can’t hear us, Carol,” June said.
“But they might see us,” Carol responded.
Amy’s brother turned from the window and eyed Harrison curiously. “So my dad says you’re a golfer?”
“I am,” Harrison said.
“I’m Kevin. Kevin Anderson.” He came forward, hand extended.
Harrison took it. “Nice to meet you.”
“I never met a pro golfer before.”
Harrison expected that statement to be followed up with questions about golf, as that’s the way it usually went when someone met their first professional golfer. But he was not expecting Kevin to ask, “So what exactly is up with you and my sister?”
Fortunately, June stepped in to answer for him before anyone else could take a breath. He’d noticed that June was especially good at answering for people.
“Nothing is up, Kevin,” she said, her tone suggesting it was a stupid question. “They just double-booked the house.”
“Technically, they triple-booked,” Carol said.
“Except the first two were the mistake. We were an add-on no matter what,” Melissa chimed in.
“Wait…what?” Kevin asked.
“Hello,” Melissa said, looking around at the rest of them. “We’re losing focus here!”
“Right,” Kevin said.
They all turned back to the window.
As it was clear that no one was going to fill Harrison in on whatever they were losing focus of, he moved forward to see for himself, standing behind June so he could peer over the top of her head.
Barb and her husband were sitting on the covered deck, side by side, facing the gray sleet and the lake. Neither of them moved save the occasional head tilt or hand shift. “What’s going on?” Harrison asked.
“We don’t know,” Carol whispered. “They were absolutely furious with each other and went outside. I thought they might come to blows! But things seem to have settled down.”
“You don’t think she’s going to reconcile with him, do you?” Melissa asked.
“Reconcile?” Kevin asked. “What do you mean, reconcile?”
“Get back together,” June said.
“I know what the word means,” Kevin huffed. “I mean, what do you mean about my parents reconciling? They’re married.”
June exchanged a look with Carol. Carol, standing closest to Kevin, reached up and patted him on the shoulder. Kevin looked at all of them, his expression clouded in confusion. Apparently, he was the last one to know.
Kevin turned back to Harrison. “Where’s Amy?”
“Ah…maybe the studio?”
Kevin looked at him oddly, and Harrison had a moment of slight panic that maybe it was obvious what he and Amy had been doing. But before anyone could ask, June gasped loudly and grabbed Carol’s arm.
“She’s getting up! She’s coming in!”
Suddenly everyone sprang into action, scattering away from the window.
Melissa assumed a place on the couch and grabbed a discarded book.
June raced for the kitchen. Carol seemed to be less sure what to do with herself and went to the tree to rearrange ornaments.
Kevin remained standing next to Harrison, looking just as confused as Harrison felt.
A moment later, Barb burst through the glass patio doors. Her face was flushed and her hair windblown. She stopped just inside and looked around at all their expectant faces. “People change,” she said. “Everyone knows that. They do.”
No one dared say a word.
“It’s cold and wet,” she said, and marched across the room to the staircase, jogging up and disappearing into the second floor.
Amy’s dad sheepishly stepped inside next. He hooked his thumbs in the belt loops of his jeans and said, “Kev, we better get going.”
“What, so soon?” Melissa trilled. She tossed aside her book. “You don’t want to stay for dinner?”
“Melissa, can you help me in the kitchen?” June called, her voice sharp.
“What’s for dinner?” Kevin asked.
Harrison was discovering that Amy’s brother could not read a room to save his life.
“We’re ordering from the barbecue place,” Carol said. “So we’ll be having brisket.”
“Sweet,” Kevin said.
“I don’t know,” his father said. “I think your mother would rather us go on before we get snowed in.”
“I’ll talk to her.” Kevin spoke with an authority he clearly did not have, and went up the stairs after his mother. “Mom! Where are you?”
His dad looked around the room. “Nice place they’ve got here,” he said to no one in particular. “Don’t know why they’d want to open it up to riffraff.”
“Are you calling us riffraff, Bob Anderson?” Carol asked.
“Present company excluded of course,” Bob said. His gaze landed on Harrison. He smiled. “Still can’t believe we got us a celebrity here. Say…what happened at Myrtle Beach a year or so ago? You were leading going into the final day and then just faded.”
Harrison did not care to be reminded how bad he’d sucked at Myrtle Beach or, in general, of any blowout losses like that. “Well…sometimes golf is harder than it looks.”
“Did you get hurt or something?”
“Hurt? Nah. It was more of a complete mental collapse.” He smiled.
Bob’s eyes rounded. “Oh. Well then.”
Yeah, well then. Harrison had begun to doubt himself as he watched Jordan Spieth steadily gain on him. He’d questioned if he had it in him to win the big moments. But he was not going to explain that to Bob Anderson just now. And anyway, shouldn’t he be saving his marriage?
“I understand,” Bob said. “Happens to me during club tournaments. I play pretty well the front nine, but if I’m even close to winning, on the back nine, I get too antsy and start missing my putts.”
Harrison gave him a thin smile.
“I remember that drive on the seventeenth hole you made on the last day. So wild and off course. You really shanked it.” He chuckled.
“I sure did,” Harrison agreed. He had to get out of here. The last thing he needed was Amy’s dad reliving his worst professional moments. The decision he was trying to make was hard enough without being reminded of all the times he’d doubted himself.
There was suddenly a commotion upstairs, the sound of Kevin’s voice drifting down over the music. “I thought you were my mom!”
Suddenly Hillary was fleeing downstairs in a bathrobe. “He walked in on me! No one told me he was up there!”
“Kevin, what have you done?” Bob Anderson demanded.
“Nothing!” Kevin shouted down the stairs.
“I was hardly dressed!” Hillary wailed.
This seemed like the best time for Harrison to slip out, and he did just that while everyone converged at the bottom of the stairs to assess the damage, if any, to Hillary.
He hightailed it down the hall and to his room, grabbed his keys and his phone, and was out of the gates probably before they even turned around.
As he headed to the strip mall, he noticed he had a call from Clay. He did not hit play, he did not return the call. He still had a few days before he had to give Clay a definitive answer.
Next to the pizza parlor was a small brown office with a sign that said simply, Vacation Rentals. The light was on, so Harrison pulled up and jogged through the sleet to the door.
Inside turned out to be a one-room operation.
The interior color scheme was as brown as the exterior.
One long counter divided the room, and behind the counter, an older guy sat in an office chair that creaked with the slightest movement.
He was wearing a Titleist golf cap, one of Harrison’s sponsors.
“Hello,” Harrison said.
The man looked up. If he recognized Harrison, he didn’t give any indication.
“I’m looking for a rental for this week. I know it’s short notice, but I figured it was worth a shot.”
“That’s short notice all right,” the man said. “I don’t know if I can help you. Lots of people come out this way for the holidays. What do you have in mind?”
“Something small and self-contained.”
The man sat up and used his feet to roll himself in his chair to an ancient computer that looked like a box. He hit a couple of keys and squinted at the screen. “How small we talking?”
“One bedroom?” Harrison ventured. Certainly not more than two. Nothing that could accommodate even a single Posse member.
“Nobody builds one-bedroom houses anymore. Everyone wants as many beds and baths as they can get. But give me a minute.” He tapped some more keys.
Harrison looked around. On a table between two chairs beneath the window was a stack of several Golf Digests.
“Not seeing much,” the man said. “Nothing anyone would want.”
“I don’t care about amenities,” Harrison said. “Just a place to rest up.”
The man snorted. “You in the witness protection program or something?”
“In a manner of speaking.” Harrison leaned across the counter. “Do you follow golf?”
The man’s head snapped up. “Sure, yeah. Why do you ask?”
“I’m Harrison Neely.”
The man stared hard at him. “I’ll be, it is you,” he said at last. “I thought you looked familiar. But you look a lot younger on the TV.”
“I do?”
“Will you look at that,” the man said, coming to his feet—which was no easy task given his girth and the fact that his chair had wheels.
He reached for Harrison’s hand and held it tight, giving such a hearty shake that Harrison worried a bone in his hand might break.
“I saw you win the Houston Open a few years back!”
“That was more than a few years,” Harrison said, grinning. “At least ten.”
“Yeah, it’s been a while.” The man let go of Harrison’s hand and put his hands on his waist. “Haven’t seen you in the clubhouse a lot since then, though.”
Meaning, he hadn’t seen Harrison win. Were the sports fans in this part of Texas determined to remind him how he’d faded in the last few years? It was entirely unnecessary, because Harrison remembered quite clearly how many times he’d finished out of the money. “I’ve been rehabbing an injury.”
“That’s right, you were in a car accident,” the man said. “Drunk driving?”
“No. Wet night.”
“You coming back to the tour?”
“That is…that is certainly the hope,” Harrison said, but was aware he didn’t sound too convincing.
“Well, I hope you do. You had a pretty swing.”
And last but not least, the reference to a swing he used to have. A little bit of him crumbled inside. This was exactly what Clay had been warning him about—a has-been at fifty.
“What brings you around here?” the man asked.
“Just taking a break before the tour starts up in January.” That was a lie. Oh well. “I just need something small. You know, to collect myself.”
“All I’ve got is a cabin,” the man said.
A cabin? Harrison felt a little thrill in him. “A cabin would be perfect.”
“Don’t know about that,” the man said. “It’s around Armadillo Point.
There’s not much over there, as the shore is pretty rocky.
The cabin doesn’t have any water access other than sticking your feet in the lake.
The owners took it off the list because they could never rent it, but recently put it back on.
” He shrugged. “It hasn’t been occupied in a while. ”
“How big is it?” Harrison asked.
“One bed, one bath. I’m telling you, no one wants to be on that side of the lake. Anyone who comes out this way is looking for luxury rentals.”
“Not me. It sounds perfect.”
“I don’t know if the heat is on. It’s got a fireplace, but once you’re up on that hill, you won’t come down till the snow melts.”
“They’ve been talking about snow all week and we haven’t seen a thing.”
“Yeah, well the snowtastrophe is on its way. Suit yourself, my friend, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He sat down and grabbed a manilla folder. He took out a paper rental agreement. Technology had not reached the outer bands of Texas.
When it was all said and done, Harrison drove around to take a look at the cabin he was not to get excited about. The instructions took him off the county road onto a pitted dirt road. He bumped along the steep drive to the cabin. He pulled into the one-car spot and got out and looked at the cabin.
He felt a smile spread across his face. “Perfect,” he said.