Fairway Lessons

It's funny what grief does to your calendar. A year ago I buried my husband, and then I packed up my golf clubs and my grief and moved two hundred miles up the coast to a town so small the pro shop doubles as the bait shop. I'm thirty-four, I teach golf for a living, and until three weeks ago my most consistent relationship was with a pitching wedge.

So when I called Harry and said, "Come visit. Intensive lessons. A whole weekend. I'll fix that swing if it kills me," he said yes so fast I actually laughed out loud on the porch.

"Really? Just like that?"

"Zoey, I have said yes to every invitation you have extended since 2014," he said, and I could hear him smiling. "Why would I start negotiating now?"

Here's the part I didn't say out loud, which is that I've wanted to climb that man like a scaffolding for over a decade. Harry's an architect, thirty-five, builds houses for rich people who say things like "entertaining space" without irony. He was the friend who showed up when Mark died with a casserole and an uncomfortable amount of silence, and he's been driving out once a month ever since, and every single visit I'd catch myself watching his hands and thinking, well. That's a thought for a woman who isn't a widow in mourning. Tuck that away.

But a year is a year. And the tucking-away was starting to feel less like decency and more like cowardice.

* * *

He arrived Friday afternoon in his rental, an absurd little silver sedan that looked embarrassed to be on a gravel road. I met him at the course at six, because the plan was lessons every evening at sunset when the course emptied out and the light went gold. The eighteenth green sits down past a stand of pines, and next to it there's the practice green and a maintenance shed nobody visits after five. Secluded. Quiet. I had not thought about why that mattered to me. I had absolutely thought about why that mattered to me.

"Okay, stance," I said, clapping once like a coach in a movie. "Show me what you've got."

He swung. I have seen car accidents with better mechanics.

"Harry. Harry, no. What was that?"

"A golf swing?" He had the nerve to look hopeful.

"That was you swatting a fly that insulted your mother. Grip first. Give me the club."

We worked on the grip for ten minutes and it was like teaching a raccoon to hold a teacup. And look, I could have stood in front of him and explained it. I'm a professional. I explain things for money. Instead I heard myself say, "Okay, we're doing this the hands-on way," and stepped behind him.

And there I was. Chest against his back, arms around him, my hands over his hands on the club. He went very still.

"Is this normal?" he asked. "Is this how teaching works?"

"This is premium instruction," I said. "Very exclusive. Most students can't afford it."

"What do most students pay?"

"Shut up and loosen your wrists."

I adjusted his left hand, then his right, my fingers sliding over his knuckles, and I'll admit I took my time about it. His hands are bigger than mine and warm, and somewhere around the third adjustment I noticed I wasn't really correcting anything anymore, I was just holding them. His breathing had changed. Not fast, just deliberate, like someone counting.

"Your pulse is in your thumbs," he said quietly. "I can feel it."

"Well, that's embarrassing for both of us, so let's never mention it again."

"Deal."

I pressed a little closer, chin nearly at his shoulder, and talked him through the take-back. Slow, I said. Everything slow. Rotate from the hips, not the shoulders. And he did rotate, and the motion moved his whole body against mine, and I thought, oh no, oh absolutely not, this was the worst idea I have ever had and I once got a bob on a dare.

"That's it," I said, and my voice came out about half a register lower than I intended. "Nice and slow."

"Zoey."

"Hm?"

"Are we still talking about golf?"

I stepped back. Smoothly, I like to think, though probably like a woman fleeing a crime scene. The sun was doing its sunset thing, everything orange and forgiving, and Harry turned around with the club still in his hands and looked at me. He didn't say anything. He has this way of waiting, like he's got all the time ever printed and I can spend mine first.

"You're here for lessons," I said. "Swing."

He swung. It was not a good swing. It was, however, the best swing of his life, because his hips finally turned, and I shouted "YES!" like he'd won the Masters, and he laughed, and the whole thing was fine and normal and professional and I definitely wasn't thinking about his hands anymore.

We played out the last of the light and walked back up to the parking lot as the sprinklers came on. He stopped by his rental and stood there a second too long, keys in hand.

"Same time tomorrow?" he asked.

"Seven. And wear something you don't mind ruining. We're doing sand shots."

"Can't wait," he said, and I watched his little silver car shrink down the road, and I stood there in the sprinkler mist getting soaked, grinning like an absolute idiot.

Because here's what I'd felt, right at the end, when I stepped behind him one last time to fix a wrist and he'd leaned back into me, just slightly, just enough. He'd leaned in. And men who don't want your hands on them don't lean back.

I got in my truck and sat there with the engine off and did the math I'd been avoiding. Ten years of friendship. One year of mourning. One weekend of lessons. And a maintenance shed forty yards from the practice green with a hasp on the door that doesn't even lock properly, which I know because I checked it Thursday, for reasons I told myself were about storage.

Tomorrow was Saturday. Sand shots in the morning, and if I worked up the nerve, an evening conversation that had nothing to do with golf at all.

Zoey, thirty-four, and Harry, thirty-five, as always. I like saying the ages because it makes it sound official.

Saturday morning we did sand shots and he only ruined one shirt, which for him was a triumph. But it was Saturday evening that things went sideways, or possibly forward, depending on your angle.

We stayed out past when I usually quit. Dusk came down soft over the eighteenth, the pines going black behind us, and I had one more correction I wanted to make to his grip. Except I'd run out of patience for the verbal method, which let's be honest I never really used.

"Give me your hands," I said.

He gave them. I pulled the strap off an old headcover, the leather one, supple from years of sun, and I wrapped it around his wrists and cinched his hands together in the proper grip. Vardon overlap, thumbs down the shaft, exactly where I'd spent ten minutes putting them Friday.

"Hey," he said, not pulling away. "Is this legal?"

"It's a training aid. Tour pros use them."

"Tour pros use things that don't smell like my golf bag."

He was right, it did smell like his golf bag, but I cinched it another notch and his breathing went shallow and nobody complained. "Now hold that. Don't let it slip."

He held it. He held it for a full minute while I walked a slow circle around him, and I'll tell you what the circle was for. It was so I could look at him, which I did, freely, while he stood there with his hands bound to a club he wasn't swinging. His knuckles were white. His mouth was a little open.

"Zoey."

"Hm?"

"What else could you teach me?"

And the way he said it. Not innocent. Not even a little