The black SUV came through the gate of the Sandpiper Links at two minutes before noon, exactly as I had told them it would, and it parked across the end of the cart path with its engine running. Three people stepped out in dark windbreakers with yellow letters on the back. The woman in front was a special agent of the Internal Revenue Service named Carla Dunmore, and she carried a clipboard rather than a gun. She walked to the bed of my old golf cart truck and looked at the canvas bag sitting there with its zipper open, packed with stacks of hundred dollar bills.
I had called her the night before from the telephone in my kitchen, after I found that bag under the tarp. Beneath the money lay a green ledger in the hand of my son in law Derek, listing nineteen golf courses up and down the Grand Strand and the cash he had collected from cart rentals, month after month, and never reported. He was the head golf professional at Sandpiper. He had been skimming the rentals for six years. Agent Dunmore ran her finger down the columns and nodded slowly, like a woman who has found the last piece of a long puzzle.
My daughter Sharon stood beside the truck with her hands pressed against her stomach. Derek stood twenty feet away on the practice green, holding a putter and looking at the black SUV as though it were a snake. The old men of my Tuesday foursome sat in their carts along the fence, silent. “Mr. Mobley,” said the agent, “you did the right thing. A good many fathers would have looked away.” I looked at Sharon, and I did not feel like a man who had done the right thing. I felt like a man who had struck his own child.
A bag found in a golf cart truck gave one retiree the morning to bring his daughter back to the fairway in Myrtle Beach.
I gave my terms in the sun on the cart path, with my hand on the fender of the truck. “Derek, you will answer to Agent Dunmore for every dollar in that bag, and you will tell her about the other eighteen courses. Sharon, you will not be asked to pick between us, and you will not be left alone. I will keep the house and the little place on the water, and I will put the money from my patent in the hands of a lawyer who has never met a golf pro. And the truck stays with me. I built this one with Naomi riding next to me, and she is not done riding.”
Sharon came across the grass to me with her sunglasses in her hand and her face wet. “Daddy,” she said, “I knew the cash was not right. I told myself that Derek was clever and that the clubs gave it to him as a bonus. I put the money into the new kitchen, and I never once asked where it came from.” She put her forehead on my chest. “You taught me to count change back to the penny when I was six, and I stopped counting. I am so ashamed that I cannot look at you.” I held her the way I had when she was small.
Derek, who had not moved, suddenly understood that the afternoon was ending badly for him. He dropped the putter, sprinted across the cart path, snatched the canvas bag out of the bed of the truck, and jumped into the nearest golf cart with the key in it. He floored the pedal, and the little cart shot forward with a whine. He got about thirty feet. The old men of my Tuesday foursome, five of them, gray haired and in plaid shorts, pulled their carts into a line across the path, bumper to bumper, like a wall of white plastic.
Derek stood on the brake and the cart slid sideways in the pine straw. The bag spilled across the grass, and the hundred dollar bills drifted out onto the fairway in the breeze, one or two of them sailing toward the water hazard. Two of the old men, both over eighty, climbed down stiffly and began gathering them up, one at a time, in their hats. Agent Dunmore walked over to Derek, said his name quietly, and handed him a form. He took it without a word. Sharon turned her face into my shoulder.
The money consequences were firm. Derek was charged with tax evasion and theft by the nineteen courses, and the green ledger became the center of the case. The cash was seized and returned to the owners of the courses where it belonged. The four million, eight hundred thousand dollars from the sale of my cart truck lift patent stayed in the bank in my name, and I made certain that Sharon had a separate account in hers, with a lawyer I trusted. The house on Ocean Boulevard was never in danger, and neither was my daughter.
In the name of Naomi, who passed in 2021, I started the Naomi Mobley Fund. It pays for motorized carts, lifts and ramps so that seniors and disabled veterans can keep moving, in Horry, Georgetown and Marion counties. In the first year we placed seventy one carts. One went to a retired shrimper in Murrells Inlet who had not left his porch in two years. When he rolled down the driveway for the first time, he waved at every car that passed, and the whole street waved back.
Sharon came out to the Sandpiper on a Tuesday morning in April and found me sitting in the old truck at the edge of the first tee. She had taken a job at the library in Conway. She had a cup of coffee for me and one for herself, and she climbed into the passenger seat where Naomi used to sit. The old men of my foursome teed off in a line, shouting insults at one another. We watched them go down the fairway, and Sharon laughed, a real laugh. I put the truck in gear and drove her slowly to the green.
