*I cannot undo the first tee,* Hollis wrote. *I can stop pretending I didn't hear what I heard.*
Zuri showed the letter to Pop at breakfast. Pop buttered his toast with great attention and then said, "A plaque doesn't feed anybody." He chewed. "A plaque also doesn't erase anybody. I'll go see it when they hang it. I won't make a speech."
"You could make a short one," Patrice said from the stove.
"I could," Pop said. "I won't."
Zuri kept Hollis's letter in the same drawer as Clifford's note. The drawer was becoming an archive of incomplete amends. She did not mind. Incomplete was honest.
XXVIII.
Spring qualifiers opened in March. Zuri's game had grown over the winter in the unglamorous way games grow: fewer fat irons, better distance control from a hundred yards, a putting stroke that did not panic when the cup looked small. She still got quick when she was angry. She still heard Clifford's voice sometimes on the first tee of her mind. She had learned to answer it with the thwack of a center strike and the discipline of writing a number on a card that was true.
Mei-Lin made the high school team as a freshman and sent Zuri a photo of her jersey. Sebastian broke eighty for the first time and called Zuri screaming so loud Patrice thought someone was hurt. Brayden texted after a tournament in which he finished second and his father did not come: *Played clean. Felt different.*
Zuri texted back: *Good.*
She did not owe him more. She also did not owe him less than acknowledgment. That balance — the precise weight of what was fair — was becoming its own kind of practice, as real as bunker shots and as easy to mis-hit.
XXIX.
On the anniversary of the Invitational, or near enough — a Saturday in early October when the light looked like the light from the year before — Zuri went back to Pinecrest as a spectator for a younger girls' clinic Penwell was running. She stood behind the ropes on the first tee and watched a nine-year-old with beads in her hair tee up a ball half as tall as her patience.
The girl topped it. The ball rolled twelve feet. Somebody in the gallery chuckled. The girl flushed, then set another ball on the tee with her jaw set in a way Zuri recognized in her bones.
Penwell caught Zuri's eye and tipped his navy cap. Pop, who had come along "just to see the place in daylight," stood with his hands in his pockets and did not go inside the bag room to look for his plaque, though Zuri knew he knew exactly which wall it was on.
Clifford Haskins walked past the clinic with a set of members headed for the grill. He saw Zuri. He hesitated. For a second it seemed he might stop. Then he nodded, a tight nod with no smile, and kept walking. It was not reconciliation. It was not even courage. It was the smallest possible recognition that she existed in his landscape as more than a problem. Zuri nodded back once, equally small, and turned her attention to the nine-year-old, who had just hit a second ball that got into the air and stayed there long enough to make the chuckle die.
"Watch where it lands," Zuri said under her breath, not for Clifford, not even for the girl, but for the part of herself that still stood on that blank wooden tee marker with a restored driver and a whole round waiting.
The ball landed in the fairway. Short. Perfect. A beginning.