Tom Becker turned the monitor all the way around so I could read it without my glasses. The membership of Desert Ridge Country Club, number 4471, was in the name of Harold J. Novak. My name. My address in Mesa. My date of birth. My signature, from a card I did not remember signing, dated the third of March, 2019, three weeks after Greg had said he was putting the money together. Under it, in a small box, he had been listed as Guest of Member, Primary. “Harold,” said Tom, “it is your membership. It has always been your membership. Your son has been your guest.”
I sat back in the leather chair and took off my lucky Phoenix Open hat. Tom explained it gently. In 2019, Greg had told the membership office that his father wished to hold the membership for estate reasons, which sometimes happens, and that Harold would designate his son as the playing guest. He signed everything as my agent, under a power of attorney that was, Tom said, a little thin. For six years the dues had been billed to a credit card in my name, a card I did not know about. Fifty two thousand dollars. And the do not admit flag could be placed only by the member. Greg had placed it as me.
Tom opened a drawer and laid a manila folder on the blotter. In it were printed screens, six months of them, showing every guest charge, every bar bill, every charge for a lesson, a locker and a cart. “I have been keeping these,” he said, “because it did not look right, and because you trained me on the line in Building 4 and told me to measure twice.” He smiled sadly. “Harold, I have the authority to restore your access this afternoon. And I have the authority to let your son and his wife stay in the dark about it until you decide what to do.”
A name on a tablet screen and a locked gate gave one retired machinist the length of a single round of golf to bring his son back to the truth in Scottsdale.
I gave my terms to Tom in that quiet office. I did not wish to ruin a birthday. I wished to play nine holes, with my own clubs, in my own hat, as a member in good standing, on the same course as my son. After that, in the clubhouse, at the end of the day, I would ask Greg and Brittany to sit down with me and Tom at a table by the window, and I would show them the folder, and I would ask them one question. I would not shout. Gloria had always said that a quiet question can fill a room better than a shout.
Tom brought my clubs himself, in his own cart, and he stood at the first tee when I stepped up. I teed up the ball. The tournament had finished the front nine and was coming in, and forty golfers stood along the fence to watch. I took a breath. I waggled the club the way I had taught my son at six. Then I swung, and the ball went straight and low and a little to the right of the pond, a hundred and seventy yards, not far, not pretty, and perfect. Somebody on the fence began to clap. I turned my head. Greg was standing at the back of the crowd in his sash.
He came to the clubhouse porch at four, where I sat with Tom and the folder, and Brittany walked behind him in white tennis shoes. Greg looked at the screen on the tablet in Tom hand. He did not deny a thing. He said he had been so ashamed of his father, of the plant and the thick hands and the way I ordered iced tea without lemon, that he could not bear for the other members to see me. “Dad, I wanted them to think I came from somewhere,” he said. Brittany snatched the folder from the table, meaning to hurry down the cart path to her car and drive off with every printed page.
She made it forty feet. Tom Becker had not moved from his chair, but he had lifted two fingers at the head groundskeeper, a gray man in a John Deere cap, who stood by the pro shop door. The groundskeeper reached into a green panel and pressed a button. Every sprinkler on the eighteenth fairway came up out of the grass at once with a hiss, in a great sweeping arc, and Brittany, in her white outfit, with the folder over her head, ran straight into the middle of a thousand gallons of spray. She screamed. Then she began to laugh.
Greg ran over with his sash flying and a towel from the pro shop, and the two of them stood together dripping on the fairway. “Dad,” said Greg, “I am sorry.” He said it again. Brittany wrung out her hair and said nothing, which, for her, was a speech. I walked down the cart path toward them, in my hat, and handed my son the framed photograph of the two of us in Tempe, in the sun, when he was six years old. He held it like a child. The membership stayed in my name, and Greg repaid the fifty two thousand dollars over four years.
In the name of Gloria, who passed in 2020, I started the Gloria Novak Fund. It pays for junior golf clubs, lessons and greens fees for children and seniors at public courses, in Maricopa, Pinal and Gila counties. In the first year we gave away three hundred cut down seven irons. A girl of seven from Apache Junction took her first swing on the practice green at Dobson Ranch and fell flat on her back laughing, and her father, who drives a bus, took off his cap and wiped his eyes. I told him that is how it starts.
Every Saturday at eight, Greg and I stand on the first tee at Desert Ridge, and he lets me hit first. I top it sometimes. He has stopped saying anything about the public course. Last week, when my ball dribbled into the rough, he smiled and said, “Dad, nice dribble.” I said, “I learned from the best.” Then he walked beside me down the fairway with his bag on his shoulder, and the sprinklers were off, and the sky over the McDowell Mountains was the color of an old Motorola dial, and for nine holes he did not look at his phone once.
