"Are you going back?" Zuri asked. "To caddie. Or to watch. Or anything."
Pop looked at the restored driver in the corner of the living room, then at the Cup on the shelf Patrice had cleared of knickknacks. "I'll go where you go. That's my membership now."
XXII.
Clifford Haskins did not apologize to Zuri in person that autumn.
He sent, through Brayden, a written note that had clearly been edited by someone with better instincts than his own. It said he regretted his "tone" on the first tee and "any implication" that she was not a welcome competitor. It did not say he had been wrong about belonging. It did not say the unfinished sentence. It was the apology of a man protecting a self-image while offering a minimum payment on a debt he still half-believed he did not owe.
Zuri read it at the kitchen table with Patrice and Pop. Patrice wanted to burn it. Pop wanted to file it. Zuri wanted, more than either, to be done with the weight of being the person who had to receive it gracefully.
She wrote back three lines on notebook paper:
*Mr. Haskins —*
*I got your note. I will see Brayden at Lakeside. I will not be discussing the first tee with you. Play well if you play.*
*— Z. Langston*
She did not mail it to his house. She gave it to Brayden at the municipal range and said, "This is for him. Not for you."
Brayden read the outside of the folded paper, not the inside, and put it in his bag. "He's been quieter at home," he said. "Not better, exactly. Quieter. Like someone turned the volume down on a show that was always on."
"Quiet isn't changed," Zuri said.
"I know." Brayden bounced a ball on his wedge, a nervous habit. "I'm changing what I can reach. That's him on some days and me on others."
It was not a speech that fixed anything. It was a boy telling the truth about the size of his hands. Zuri could respect that without confusing it for his father's repentance.
XXIII.
Lakeside came on a morning that smelled of cut grass and lake water. The field was larger. The pressure was smaller. Zuri shot seventy-three and finished second to a girl from two counties over who putted like a machine. Brayden finished fifth. Mei-Lin finished third. Sebastian missed the cut by a stroke and sat on his bag afterward eating a granola bar with the philosophical air of a boy who had decided missing by one was a curriculum.