The Par 3 Set

Let me explain how a golf professional ends up in a recording studio above a bicycle shop on a Tuesday night.

Texting. That's how. Shane Bachman texted me eleven times over four days. I counted. The last one just said "PLEASE" with no other context, which from a forty-one-year-old man is honestly alarming.

I'm Carolyn Webber, thirty-four, head pro at Riverbend Municipal, and I've been happily single for eight years by choice. My singing voice is a documented hazard. My sister once asked me to stop humming in the car. But the charity was good, a caddie scholarship for local kids, and Shane has been my occasional golf buddy since I joined his home course at twenty-three. You don't leave a man hanging on eleven texts.

So I said yes. To a country-rock charity single. Written by committee. God help me.

The studio was up a narrow staircase that smelled like tube amp heat and old carpet. The coffee maker was broken. There was one good vocal booth and a guy standing in front of it who I recognized from the charity committee meeting: Marvin Holcomb, owner of the place, bought it at twenty-eight with an inheritance and a chip on his shoulder apparently.

"Carolyn," he said. "You're late."

"Your stairs are a death trap. I was being careful."

"Fair." He waved me in. "Addie, this is the golf pro."

Addie was at the console, twenty-nine, engineer, zero patience visible on her face. "Hey. Please sing on pitch. I'm begging!"

"We'll see what I can do."

We ran the song once. It was bad. Not my bad, the song's bad. Some line about fairways and friendship that nobody should ever put on a record. I sang my part anyway, and Marvin stopped me twice to talk about my sibilance.

"Your S-sounds are popping," he said. "Sibilance. Sib-il-ance. You're hissing on the consonants."

"I know what sibilance is, Marvin."

"Do you? Because you pronounced it wrong in the email."

I did not remember the email. I chose to let it go, which for me is a growth experience.

Then, on a break, he picked up the putter I'd left by my bag. He held it like a man stirring soup.

"Okay, stop," I said. "You're choking it. Your grip pressure is all wrong, your wrists are locked, and you'd three-putt from four feet."

"It's a prop."

"It's a crime scene." I fixed his hands. Left grip first, then right, my usual routine with new members. He was stiff and annoyed about it but he let me.

"Better," he admitted.

"Right? Feel that? Hands are just passengers."

"Tempo's the same in golf and singing, you know," he said, like he was granting me wisdom.

"It's really not."

"It is. You'd know if you played an instrument."

"I play golf."

He gave me a look I gave him right back. Great chemistry, everybody says so.

The session ran long. The song got marginally less terrible, mostly because Addie threatened to quit if the bridge stayed in. Around ten I nailed my take, or as close as my voice gets to nailing anything, and Shane texted a row of golf ball emojis, which I assume meant gratitude.

I was packing up when Marvin said it. Muttered it, really, half to himself, staring at the console.

"God, you attack it. You swing like a trucker."

I should have been offended. Instead I laughed. Hard. The kind of laugh where you have to sit down.

"What?" he said.

"Trucker. That's the meanest thing anyone's said about my tempo and it's also true."

"I wasn't trying to be mean."

"You're always trying to be mean. You're just bad at it." I grabbed my bag. "Same time Tuesday?"

He nodded, already turning back to Addie. I liked him more than I wanted to.

The next Tuesday I got there early. He wasn't ready. Door was unlocked, which he later called a structural failure of Addie's memory, and I walked in with the glove I'd forgotten the week before, meaning to drop it and go.

And there he was.

Marvin Holcomb, thirty-eight, owner of this studio, hater of cheesy singles, was standing in the live room in a green silk dress. Knee-length, vintage, fitted at the waist. He was lip-syncing into a hairbrush to a Patsy Cline record playing on the studio turntable. Full commitment. Eyes closed. One hand doing an interpretive thing in the air.

I did not make a sound. I froze in the doorway, glove in hand, like a burglar who'd broken in to rob a house of nothing.

Patsy sang on. Marvin opened his eyes.

We looked at each other for what felt like a full chorus.

Then he walked over, very calmly, and turned the record down. Which took forever, because the turntable was across the room, and the whole walk I could hear my own pulse.

"Okay," he said. "So."

"So," I said.

"This isn't a bit." He said it flat, like reading terms and conditions. "I wear dresses. Alone, mostly. I have since my twenties. It's not a joke and I'm not doing a character, and if you want to leave and pretend you didn't see it, that's fine. I'd actually prefer it."

He said it all in one breath. His ears were red.

I looked at the dress. Green silk, honestly beautiful, probably older than both of us. I looked at the hairbrush. I looked at him.

"Is that Patsy Cline on vinyl?" I asked.

"Yes!"

"Then I'm not leaving. I want to hear the rest of the song."

He blinked. "You're serious?"

"I'm a golf pro who sang on a charity single tonight because a man texted me PLEASE eleven times. My standards for embarrassment died years ago."

Marvin sat down on the amp case. The dress did a thing when he sat, a smooth settling, and I realized I'd been curious about exactly that my whole adult life.

"Ask whatever," he said.

"Why green?"

"It was my grandmother's neighbor's. Long story. It's the best one."

"How many do you have?"

"A wardrobe's worth. Locked. Which is why you've never seen it, and why I'd like to keep my reputation as an unbearable jerk intact."

"Too late. You fixed a putter grip today under duress. People will talk."

He almost smiled. Then he looked at me, actually curious now. "Why aren't you weirded out?"

And there it was, the part I'd never said to anyone.

"Because I've thought about it," I said. "Since college. Wearing something like that. I never had the nerve. Or the privacy, honestly, I had roommates till I was twenty-three."

Marvin stared at me. Patsy Cline spun quietly to the end of the song and the needle hissed in the runout groove, and neither of us moved to lift it.

"You're messing with me," he said.

"I have literally never been less funny than I am right now."

Marvin got up and crossed to the back wall. There was a door I'd assumed was a closet. It was a closet. He unlocked