Page 23 of Putting Out
“Oh, I have a message for you from Gus,” Erica told her around a forkful of apple and cinnamon.
Reilly groaned. She’d spoken with her agent just once since the announcement. She gave him her prepared statement and told him he would know when she did what she was going to do. He’d sputtered, he’d coughed, he’d whined and he’d begged. He'd said her whole life was riding on this single decision and should she make the wrong choice, everything everywhere would be ruined forever.
Gus had a flair for the dramatic.
“I don’t think I want to hear this.”
“He said he thinks he’s dying and the right thing to do would be to grant a dying man his last wish. He said if he had to he would apply to the Make a Wish Foundation and get them to lean on you.”
“Sounds like Gus.”
Erica dropped her fork on the empty plate and pressed her finger down on a few crumbs that had escaped the fork and popped her finger into her mouth.
“I think you’re doing the right thing,” Erica noted as soon as she removed the digit from her mouth. “Sure it’s great you got ranked so high, but do you want the entire planet scrutinizing you on every shot, pointing out every weakness? You’re a great golfer. You show up at the American and you’re nothing better than a circus freak.”
“I haven’t made up my mind one way or the other.”
“Are you seriously telling her she shouldn’t do it?” Kenny reached for Erica’s plate before she bent down and started to lick it.
“I can’t tell Reilly to do anything,” Erica corrected. “I just think…” She stopped herself for a moment as if once again trying to make sure she had it right in her head first. “I think it could hurt her career. I think it could end it. What happens after you play the American? Are you going to play with the men full-time? Are you going to play against guys like Roy Staddler and Sinjin Rye week in and week out? They’ll crush you. They’ll make you look like a hack and you know it.”
Reilly gritted her teeth. Erica wasn’t trying to be hurtful. They were fair questions.
“You don’t know that,” her Pop defended her. “You don’t know how she might stack up.”
“Sorry, Mr. O’Reilly, but I do. What’s your average driving distance?” she asked Reilly.
“Two-seventy something,” Reilly admitted. “But I’ve hit it over two-eighty.”
“Two-eighty. Yours is the top driving distance on the women’s tour, but it’s about forty yards short of where you would need to be to compete against the top-ranked men. So now you’re forty yards behind your playing partner. He’s hitting nine irons and wedges into the greens and you’re pulling out your five iron if you’re lucky. You know what those greens are like. It’s like hitting a ball onto a small patch of ice. You can’t spin it like the other guys with the club in your hand. You can’t get it high enough without sacrificing distance. In the end you go from being a legend to a footnote on the PGA tour. Your epitaph to golf will be: ‘The girl who couldn’t make the cut.’ Is that what you want?”
The room grew quiet. For the first time, Kenny and Pop were forced to hear what up until now Reilly had only been thinking. There wasn’t anything Erica said that Reilly hadn’t told herself a million times. It was brutal but it was the truth, and she didn’t want to be a footnote.
“I worked so hard to be the best,” she whispered. She looked first to Kenny then to her Pop. “Is it wrong to want to try and protect that?”
“No,” Pop said. “It’s not wrong.”
“Sorry. I don’t buy it. Sounds to me like you’re scared,” Kenny interjected. “This is one tournament. You fu… you mess it up, fine. You go back to doing what you’ve been doing. Why does it have to be some big thing? Why can’t it just be about a chance to play in a major?”
“Because she’s Reilly,” Luke answered his friend, although his eyes remained glued to her. “And I’ve never known your sister to play for fun.”
Reilly met Luke’s gaze and tried to read his mind. If he gave her any indication one way or the other about what he thought, it might have been easier. She trusted him when it came to the game. If he thought she had a chance to be something other than lame, then maybe it would be worth the risk. Or if he felt the same way that Erica did, it would make her choice that much easier. But he said nothing else. Instead, he stood and gathered his plate and her grandmother’s.
“I’ll take these into the kitchen.”
“You clear and I’ll clean,” Reilly announced.
“I’ll dry,” Kenny declared in what was a familiar routine.
“You don’t have a dishwasher?” Erica asked in disbelief. “This place is so eighteen hundred.”
“Notsoeighteen hundred,” Grams corrected her. “We do have a flat-screen TV. Seamus, if you wouldn’t mind.”
Pop stood and helped his wife maneuver herself to a standing position then brought her walker around for her. The couple left the dining room on their way to their bedroom, which had since been moved from upstairs to a downstairs bedroom off the back of the house.
“You all get a good night sleep,” Grams wished them.
“And behave,” Pop added. It was a subtle reminder to the couple in the house the bedroom doors upstairs were to remain closed throughout the night.
But one person was already trying to figure out how long a wait it would be before the misbehavior got underway.
