The Last Tee Time

The clubhouse gets loud in a way I never noticed before this year. Not loud, exactly. Full. Carts humming, guys arguing about handicaps, the soda machine dying slowly all summer. Then everyone leaves at six and the whole building exhales and it's just me and the floor buffer and whatever's on the radio.

My daughter moved out in August. Nora, nineteen now, off to her second year at UW, and honestly she'd been half gone for months. Still. The house went quiet the day the U-Haul pulled out, and I discovered I do not care for quiet.

So I stay late. Lockup is my job anyway, but I've turned it into a ritual. Check the cart barn, kill the lights in the pro shop, walk the putts out on the practice green until the light goes purple. Ten o'clock, most nights. Later when I can't stand it.

My ex from way back, a woman I taught with at twenty-four, used to say I was the kind of person who fills silence with chores. She wasn't wrong. Claire, her name was. We lasted about a year and a half and ended it like adults, which felt weirdly worse. Anyway. That was a lifetime ago and I don't bring her up at parties.

Point is, the club is my excuse to not go home to a house with one car in the driveway.

* * *

Ruby Swan books the last lesson slot every Thursday. Forty-six, some kind of executive at an insurance company downtown, always in those expensive golf skirts that look like they've never been rained on. She started lessons in April. Terrible swing. Beautiful attitude about it. She laughs when she shanks one, which is rarer than you'd think.

Tonight's lesson ran long because she's actually getting good, which annoys me in a way I can't explain. We wrapped up around eight, dusk coming on fast, the way it does here in October. She put her clubs in her car, a silver Audi with a roof rack, and then just stood next to it.

Didn't leave.

I locked the pro shop and came out and there she still was, leaning on the trunk, looking at the course like it owed her an apology.

"You forget something?" I called.

She turned. "My will to go home, possibly."

"That's a special order. Takes six weeks."

She laughed. She has a good laugh, low, surprised at itself. "Sorry. I don't mean to loiter. It's just the nicest hour of my whole week, and then it ends and I get in the car and drive back to the place I'm staying and answer emails until my eyes hurt."

"Thursday's my worst day," I admitted. "Mondays are packed. Thursdays die at three."

"So we're both avoiding our houses." She said it lightly, but it landed somewhere.

I should have said goodnight. I knew that. Instead I heard myself say, "We repaired the putting green by eighteen back in September. Haven't had a chance to show anybody."

"Show me," Ruby said, and it wasn't a question, and I said okay before I'd thought about it at all.

* * *

You can't drive a cart on the paths after dark without club clearance, which I have, so we took one cart and I drove slow with the headlights on. The course at dusk is a different animal. Everything goes soft. The fairways look like something out of a painting your aunt would buy.

"God," Ruby said. "I've played this hole fifty times and I've never seen it like this."

"You've played it maybe six times."

"I exaggerate for drama. It's a corporate skill."

We parked near the green and walked out. I gave her the tour, such as it was. New fringe, new drainage, the works. She nodded along like I was showing her a museum piece.

"Sit," she said, and pointed at the bench the club put by eighteen two summers ago. Wooden, weathered, dedicated to some departed member named Hal who I only know from the plaque. She sat. I sat. It felt like something, though I couldn't have told you what.

"Tell me about travel," she said.

"Travel?"

"You mentioned Cancun once. The golf trip. You talked about it for ten minutes and I've thought about it since."

So I told her. Cancun, three years ago, a teaching conference that was half conference and half drinking by the pool. I went alone. Nora was at camp. It rained two of the five days and I loved it, the rain, sitting on a covered patio watching the ocean lose its temper.

"I haven't gone anywhere in years," Ruby said. "My ex used to plan everything. Trips, restaurants, weekends. When she left I realized I'd forgotten how to want things."

Her ex was a woman named Penelope, I'd learned that much over weeks of Thursday small talk. Fourteen years together, ended amicably-ish two years back. Ruby doesn't complain about it. She states facts and then changes the subject, which is its own kind of complaint.

"What do you want now?" I asked.

She looked out at the eighteenth green, dark except where the floodlights caught it. "To not answer an email for one entire evening. To feel my body do something besides sit." She turned a golf ball over in her fingers, one she'd pocketed from her bag. "This sounds melodramatic."

"It doesn't."

"It does. But thank you for lying."

"I'm not lying. I'm the definition of the thing you're describing. My kid left in August and I've been sleeping at my office ever since, basically. I take the lockup keys like they're a security blanket."

"Your daughter's in college?" She knew this. She knew Nora existed. But she asked anyway, in the way people do when they want you to talk.

"Second year. She's thriving. I'm the one lying on the kitchen floor."

Ruby laughed again. "You don't seem like a kitchen floor person."

"I'm a driveway person. I sat in the car for forty minutes the night she left."

"And then you came here."

"And then I came here."

The floodlights buzzed. Somewhere off in the trees, some bird made a noise birds shouldn't make at night. Ruby rolled the ball across the green, a lazy little putt that stopped three feet out.

"Who's winning?" she asked.

"Nobody. Green's closed."

"Everything's closed. That's the whole appeal." She leaned back on the bench, arms spread along the top rail, and for a second the position felt dangerous, all that open space next to me. "This is the first time in months I've felt my pulse slow down."

I didn't move closer. I want it on record that I didn't. But I noticed the gap, is all. Noticed it like a new drainage problem you'd walk around all winter.

"Same time next week?" I said, standing.

"Same time," Ruby said. "Maybe later."

I drove us back. She got in her Audi. I watched her taillights go down the lane and then I locked the cart barn and stood in the parking lot a minute longer than a person with a normal relationship to her job would.

Thursday, then.

* * *

The next Thursday it rained, which in the Pacific Northwest is not an event, it's a season. Ruby showed up anyway. Her lesson ran long because her short game is a crime scene and she insists on revisiting it.

By the time we were done it was past eight. The clubhouse had gone quiet hours ago. Six o'clock, the whole place empties like somebody pulled a plug. I'm used to it. I've built a whole sad little life around it, actually.

Ruby didn't leave either. She stood under the awning by the pro shop, golf bag over her shoulder, watching the rain come down sideways.

"I don't actually have somewhere to be," she said.

"Neither do I."

"That's what I figured." She shifted the bag. "Can I tell you something stupid?"

"Please. I collect stupid!"

"I book the last lesson slot on purpose. Seven to eight. Every week. It's not an accident."

I already knew that. What I didn't know was why. "Okay."

"Because after eight, if I leave here, I go back to my hotel. And the hotel has a desk, and the desk has my laptop, and the laptop has four hundred emails from people who think urgency is a personality. So I stretch the lesson. I buy balls I don't need. I chip balls into the practice net in the dark like a lunatic. I've been doing it since April."

"Wait. You live in a hotel?"

"Since September. I sold my condo. I'm between places, officially. Unofficially I'm hiding from my own life at the Meridian downtown." She said it fast, like ripping tape off. "Room 1102. I could give you the tour. It would take eight seconds. There's a bed and a coffee maker and a view of a parking garage."

I laughed. I shouldn't have, maybe, but I did, and she laughed too, that low surprised laugh of hers, like it caught her off guard every time.

"It's not funny," she said.

"It's a little funny. I sleep at my office."

"You do not."

"On a cot, Ruby. I keep a cot in the back office. My daughter moved out in August and I've been avoiding my house like it owes me money. I sit in the driveway for forty minutes before I can even go in. One car in the driveway. That's the whole show."

"God!" She looked out at the rain. "We're a pair."

"We're a disaster."

"Disaster pair. Sounds like a corporate team-building exercise." She turned to me. "Aileen. Can I ask you something real?"

"Sure."

"Thursday. Is it the worst day of your week too?"

I stopped. Because yes, obviously, Thursday dies at three and then it's just me and the lockup keys until ten, and I'd never once said it out loud to anybody. "Yes. How did you know that?"

"Because you get this look around three. Like the lights are going down in the whole building and you're the only one left on stage." She shrugged. "I notice things. Occupational hazard."

The rain kept coming. Neither of us moved toward a car.

"Come inside," I said. "I'll show you the clubhouse after hours. It's the least glamorous thing I can offer. There's a soda machine that's been dying all summer, we can watch it struggle."

"That's the best offer I've had in years."

An empty clubhouse is like this. It's not peaceful. It's loud in a different way. All that carpet and all those trophy cases and nobody in it. You can hear the ice machine. You can hear your own footsteps and think, well, that's embarrassing, I walk loud.

I unlocked the side door and let Ruby in. She looked around the lobby like she'd never seen it, which she has, forty times, but not like this. Not dead.

"Walk me through it," she said. "Lockup ritual. I want the full tour."

So I did. Pro shop, lights off. Register counted, drawer shut. Cart barn checked, doors latched. Keys jangling the whole time like a prison dramatization. Ruby trailed behind me with her hands in her pockets, commenting.

"This is the least sexy building tour in history," she said.

"I never claimed otherwise."

"Please never claim otherwise!"

The locker room was last. Big room, wooden benches, the whole men's-and-women's pairing with the women's side nicer because the women's side always is. I flipped on half the lights, the low ones, and the room went amber. Ruby set her bag down and sat on the bench like she owned the place.

"Okay," she said. "Now the soda machine."

"The soda machine's out front."

"Then we need supplies. Do you have beer in this establishment or is that against your religion?"

"We have beer. Members' fridge in the back. I'm technically allowed one after close. Technically."

"Two technicallys, then."

So I got two. The fridge in the staff room has the good stuff left over from the member-guest tournament, the kind members drink and then leave half of, which is a thing rich people do that I will never understand. I brought them back and sat down next to her on the bench. Not across the room. Next to her. There was maybe a hand's width of bench between us and neither of us moved to make it wider.

The dying soda machine hummed through the wall. Rain on the roof. Ruby twisted her cap off with her sleeve, which is a hotel-room habit if I ever saw one.

"To disaster pairs," she said.

"To Thursday."

We drank. The beer was cold and stupid good, the way beer is when you're not supposed to have it. Ruby stretched her legs out and crossed her ankles and looked at the ceiling.

"I have not sat in a room with another person this late in I don't know how long," she said. "That sounds like a joke. It's not. Penelope handled all the people. When she left, the people left. Turns out I have no friends. I have quarterly reviews."

"You have a golf instructor."

"I have a golf instructor who sleeps on a cot in a cart barn." She looked over at me. "Aileen. What are we doing here?"

The honest answer was I don't know. The truer answer was something I wasn't ready to say out loud, so I said the middle one.

"We're avoiding our houses," I said. "Together."

"That's not nothing."

"No. It's not nothing."

She turned the beer bottle in her hands. Her shoulders had come down somewhere in the last hour. All that corporate posture melting off her by degrees, and I kept noticing it, the way you notice weather.