Chapter 1 Bad Luck’s Human Conduit #2
It would be easily five or six seconds before the enormity of what I had done at the practice net began to hit home.
It would be seconds after that I would be kneeling on the ground with the caddies, surrounding Kenny, his eyes already glassy marbles the color of walnuts, his breathing labored for a teenage boy whose summer job was carrying golf bags for miles and miles in sometimes sweltering summer heat.
I was useless: I had no idea what to do or how to help.
“In a while,” I said to my mom. I found coping was easiest when I shut my eyes.
The pillow was sodden from hours of gentle crying—not biblical keening, my body was never racked by sobs, because that’s not how my family ever behaved—and I didn’t mind the fact I was nestling in what felt like a heavy, waterlogged sponge.
I craved punishment. And a hot soggy pillow and hunger seemed the right start.
“It’ll be interesting to see whether this rises to a level of criminal liability, or whether it will just be a civil lawsuit,” my father said.
I flinched at the word criminal, and my mother added, “He doesn’t mean you, honey. He means the club.”
“No, of course not,” said my father. “I just find it fascinating—from a legal point of view.”
“Will Mira have to testify?” my mother asked him.
“If there’s a criminal case? Perhaps. But, obviously, not if she’s a defendant. And if it’s only a civil case, she won’t, because, I promise you, the club or the netting manufacturer will settle before it ever goes to trial.”
“Well, if they do settle, I hope we never hear the sum. I have no interest in knowing the fiscal value of a human life,” said my mother.
“For God’s sake, that’s kind of part of my job. Aren’t you fascinated? A little curious?”
“I am not. It’s not a fact I want to know.”
“Well,” he said dismissively, “I will never put indifference before concern.”
“That’s not it at all.”
“I’ll call Spencer and tell him what happened,” my father said. “I want to be sure he hears about this from us, not through the rumor mill. I don’t want the news to adversely affect his internship in Washington because he loses focus.”
“It’s an internship, Peter. If he loses focus, the sun will rise.”
“I’m thinking about his future. I’m thinking about—”
“Stop talking,” I said into the pillow, but loud enough for them both to hear me. “Please: just stop,” I added, pressing my forehead into the wet down and beckoning the sable embrace of the dark.
My golf coach called and wanted to come by the house.
She was the pro at another Westchester club but had taken me under her wing when, at fourteen, I won the women’s championship at Tallmadge Country Club, a two-day tournament, shooting seventy-three the first day and seventy-one the second.
I made four consecutive birdies that Sunday.
When I escaped a bunker on eleven, my shot rolled into the cup as if drawn by a magnet.
Heidi Romming was somewhere in her mid-sixties, and though her hair was nearly white, her blue eyes were as vibrant as they were in color photos I’d seen of her taken twenty years earlier, and her skin had not been cooked by decades on golf courses.
(Most older golfers I’d met had the brown, leathery skin of my father’s wallet.) It’s unlikely you recognize her name, but she’d played for three years in LPGA tournaments and still looked great in short pastel golf skirts.
Her accent was, I know now, upper midwestern, where she was from, her Norwegian grandparents settling there just after the Civil War, and she would have sounded right at home in the movie Fargo and the TV series it spawned.
We spoke briefly on the phone, and the call ended with my telling her, “There’s nothing you can do or anyone can do. He’s dead. He’s dead and I’m done.” It was melodramatic, but it was also true.
The news had traveled fast to my friends that Kenny Foster was dead and that I was the instrument of his death.
I talked to none of them that night, however, though many of them, including the forty-seven-year-old man who slept with me when his schedule permitted, called.
(I knew it was him because of our signal: two rings at nine p.m., after which he’d hang up.
I would call him back within five minutes, if I could.
That night, alas, I couldn’t.) The only people I spoke to that evening, other than my mother and father, were my older brother, whom my parents had already phoned in Washington, D.C.
, to tell him what his kid sister had done, and two detectives who came to our house about eight o’clock.
But I didn’t speak to even them for very long, because my father was adamant that I wasn’t going to say much more than hello without a lawyer—a lawyer other than him—present.
They were in their thirties, both tall and slender, and my parents didn’t allow them into the living room, and so our brief exchange was in the front hall, our dog, a mutt that was mostly springer spaniel and had great brown-and-white curls and soulful eyes, watching us from the landing on the stairs.
(Some of you, I would wager, picked up this memoir and supposed our dog would have a name born of golfing or the links.
No, our dog was named Harvey, after the drink, the Harvey Wallbanger.
Both of my parents liked that cocktail a lot: it’s basically a screwdriver with Galliano, an Italian liqueur that came in a bottle perfectly shaped for the 1970s.
Imagine a lava lamp with booze. We gave the dog that name because his zoomies were so extreme when he was a puppy that when we first brought him home, he’d lose his footing on the hardwood floors and bang into walls.)
“How ya doin’, Miss Winston?” asked one. “Remember me, your old friend Detective Richie Marino?”
I did remember. He had been one of the detectives to visit me after I smashed a window on Frank Pendleton’s car three years earlier. “Yes, sir,” I replied, a far more chastened soul that I had been back then.
He smiled. His tone had the sort of fatuous bonhomie that would have been appropriate if he were inquiring about a hangover the Sunday morning after the high school keggers—or keg parties—that were how I spent many of my Friday and Saturday nights in high school.
(Many, but not most. Some weekend nights I actually did homework, and since I was fifteen there had been those weekend—and weekday—nights when I would meet a man three times my age in hotel rooms in Manhattan or his home in Westchester, always sneaking in through the back door.)
“So, how are ya?”
I put out my hands, palms up. I didn’t have it in me to lie and mumble that I was fine. Because I wasn’t fine. Not at all.
“Yeah,” he said when I was silent. “I get it. I do. Well, tonight I have with me Detective Jerry Corbin.” The other fellow nodded. “We don’t think you did anything wrong. It’s not like you busted up a car window. Or a stop sign.” He smirked.
“No,” I said.
“We just want to ask you a few questions.”
My father was having none of this. “I want a lot of things in this world, Detective, most of which I can’t have and won’t get,” he said.
“I told you: you can’t ask her any questions without a lawyer present.
I’ve already called a friend of mine who’s a defense lawyer, and we can schedule an interview at everyone’s convenience over the next few days. ”
The detective shrugged. “Or she can come to the station.”
“You’re not going to arrest my daughter because she hit a golf ball at the country club’s practice net.”
“Nope. We’re not. Of course we’re not. But we do have some questions.”
“About what?” He sounded incredulous.
“Well, Miss Winston, did you know there was a hole in the net?”
“Obviously, no,” I answered.
“She wouldn’t have been using it if she knew there was a hole,” my father said. “And do we even know for a fact the hole was already there? I rather doubt it.”
“How often are you there—at the driving range?”
“It’s not a driving range. It’s just a net,” I corrected him.
“So. How often?”
I shrugged. “Maybe three or four days a week.”
“That many?”
“In the summer? I guess.”
“Ever see a tear in the net before?”
“I never noticed a tear ever,” I replied.
“You look?”
“Detective, we’re done,” said my father.
“This really doesn’t involve my daughter.
She’s just a girl who was hitting golf balls.
If anyone is responsible for the death of that poor boy—and I’m not sure anyone is, and I’m a lawyer—it’s the country club or the net manufacturer.
Sometimes things happen, and there’s no one to blame but the stars. ”
“And what kind of lawyer are you, Mr. Winston? Remind me.”
“Contracts,” he replied curtly.
The detective pressed his tongue into his cheek, digesting this.
He nodded and handed my father his card.
“Got it,” he said. Then he looked at me and bowed his head ever so slightly, a gesture that was unexpectedly chivalric, and continued, “Thank you for letting us bother you. We’ll let you all know when we have more questions. ”