“Describe the man, if you would,” I said to the bank manager, and he turned his tablet around and slid it across the table. On the screen was a still image from the camera in the lobby, grainy and gray. A man in a pale blue polo stood at the teller window, holding a check, with the embroidered crest of our club stitched on his chest and the words Member Guest across the sleeve. His face was turned half toward the lens. Mr. Tate, the manager of our pro shop, who had come with me for exactly this reason, leaned in until his nose almost touched the glass. “Mr. Pomeroy,” he said, “I sold that shirt myself. We only made a hundred forty four of them.”
Wyatt, my sixteen year old grandson, looked at the picture for no more than three seconds. “Granddad, that is Bradford,” he said, and his voice did not shake. The whole room went still. Mrs. Holloway, the membership director, nodded slowly. “I recognize the walk,” she said. “He has his weight on his left foot, the way he stands over a putt.” She opened her folder. “Mr. Pomeroy, I have also compared the letter that transferred the certificate of your wife with the signature you filed with us in 1998. The slant of the D is wrong. The crossbar of the T is wrong. It was not written by you.”
Bradford Kessler arrived at the clubhouse twenty minutes later in his golf cart, in the very same shirt, with a coffee in his hand and a smile that went out like a pilot light as he took in the faces around the table. “Dewitt, what is all this?” he asked. I slid the tablet to him. For a long moment he said nothing. Then he tried a laugh. “That could be anyone,” he said. “Dewitt, you asked me to handle the bank for you. Your memory is not what it was.” I answered in the voice I once used with golf club salesmen. “Bradford, I have never in my life written a check for a quarter of a million dollars.”
A pale blue member shirt left on a pro shop counter gave one grandfather the weekend to bring his daughter back to the first tee in Pinehurst.
Ashley came in last, white as a sheet, and stood just inside the door. My daughter had not known about the check. I could see it in the way her hand went to her throat. Wyatt took a folded paper from the pocket of his jacket. “Mom, I found these in the golf bag of Dad last month,” he said. “I did not know what they were.” It was a page of yellow lined paper covered in the same signature, Dewitt Pomeroy, over and over, forty or fifty times, each one a little better than the last. Ashley read it, and she made a small sound, as if she had been struck. “Bradford,” she whispered. “Oh, Bradford.”
I gave my terms in the middle of the grill room, with Mrs. Holloway taking notes. The certificate of Lorraine would be returned to my name by the end of the day. Bradford would resign his membership, and the board would vote on the matter within the week. He would repay every dividend he had collected, down to the dollar. The check for two hundred fifty thousand dollars would stay on hold at the bank, and I would decide about the authorities after I had read his written confession. And Bradford would not set foot on the first tee again as long as I was alive.
Bradford sat down in the nearest chair and for the first time looked old. “Dewitt, I had a loan,” he said. “A land deal in South Carolina that went bad. I thought if I could get it done quickly, no one would ever have to know.” I looked at the man who had married my only daughter and who had sat at my table for twenty two Thanksgivings. “Son, if you had come to me with that story, I would have helped you,” I said. “I have helped people with worse.” He nodded. He did not cry. But his hands, which had never shaken on a putt, shook hard on the arms of that chair.
That night Ashley sat with me on the porch of my cottage, and we watched the sprinklers come on across the fairway. She did not speak for a very long time. “Daddy, I am going to stay with him while he sorts it out,” she said at last. “And then I am going to decide who I am going to be.” I told her that was the honest answer of a grown woman. She leaned against my shoulder the way she did at five years old, and Wyatt, behind us, was quietly raking the seventh green in the dusk. I realized that my grandson had grown into a man while I was not looking.
The money consequences were prompt. Bradford repaid the dividends within sixty days, from the sale of a boat and a lake lot, and he wrote a long, careful confession that I read twice. The bank cancelled the check. In the end I did not press charges, but I kept the confession in a safe, where it will remain. The club board voted unanimously to end his membership, and Mrs. Holloway returned the certificate of Lorraine to me in a leather folder, with a handwritten note. It said, This belongs where she would have wanted it. I put the folder in the drawer beside her photograph.
In the name of Lorraine, who passed six years ago and who walked the course at dawn every day for fifty years, I started the Lorraine Fairway Fund. It pays for lessons, equipment and caddie scholarships for young people in Moore County who have never been allowed on a fairway. In the first year, we sent twenty two children through the program. A boy of twelve, in borrowed shoes, hit his first drive two hundred yards down the middle. He turned to me with his mouth open and said, “Mr. Pomeroy, did I do that?” I told him he certainly did.
In May, I rose before the sun and drove my cart to the first tee. Wyatt was waiting there in the old shirt of his father, with my driver in his hands. The mist lay in the low places on the fairway, and a mockingbird sang from the pines. I teed up the ball with my arthritic fingers and found the comfortable grip I designed when I was forty years old. I swung, and the ball rose into the pink light and landed softly, a hundred ninety yards out. Wyatt let out a whoop. I handed him the club and said, “Your turn.”
