Page 15 of Iron

“I've got the head for it,” I growl.

He looks at me for a moment, then hands me the hybrid instead of the long iron I expected. No words. I trust him, and now he trusts me. Something about that settles into my chest and steadies me more than words.

I take my stance, run through the routine, the same one I've run a hundred times this week. Practice swing. Step up. Look. Breathe. Focus. Swing.

The contact is the kind you feel in your teeth, clean and explosive. I know right after the ball leaves my club that I've hit it exactly the way I wanted. It carries over the water with room to spare, drawing gently right to left the way I pictured it, flying at the flag the whole way. And it lands just short of the pin, one hop, spinning back toward the cup, the gallery around the green coming to their feet as it heads toward the hole.

“Get in,” I hear myself say, quiet, almost like a prayer.

It gets in.

The green explodes, a real roar instead of polite applause, and Stephen grabs my shoulder and shakes it once, hard, before catching himself and going back to composed. But I saw it. I saw him nearly lose it for a second.

“Double eagle,” he says, like he needs to say it out loud to believe it. “That's a two on a par five, TJ. An albatross.”

“I know what a double eagle is, Stephen.”

“Don’t you get smart with me. I just watched you do that from two-thirty-one.”

I’m smiling so hard my face hurts as I walk up to the green, high-fiving strangers in the gallery who are cheering like they’ve known my name my whole life instead of just two days. For one perfect stretch of fairway, there’s no Gavin McClain, no clubhouse deck, no fucking ice pick in my chest. Just this. Just the ball finding the hole from an impossible distance because I trusted the shot and hit it clean.

The rest of the round rides that high. Careful pars mixed in, nothing careless. By eighteen, I’m sitting at five under and I want to finish it the way I did on Thursday.

Same tee shot. Same clean strike. The ball splits the fairway, and I follow it up with an approach that lands soft, fifteen feet from the pin. When the putt drops for one last sweet birdie, the crowd around the final green gives me the kind of applause that’s real. A quick walking interview one-on-one, “Kept my focus, trusted the numbers, yada, yada, yada“ then we are walking to scoring.

“Six under,” Stephen says, signing off on my card after I do. “And your best round of the week.”

“I was five under on Thursday,” I argue.

“Thursday you were about to puke on your own shoelaces,” he grins. “Go eat something. Actual food, not another protein bar. You earned it today.”

I don’t let myself think about Gavin again until I’m back in my hotel room, showered, staring at the ceiling. And even then, it’s not four seconds on a deck that comes to mind.

It’s that beautiful albatross disappearing into a hole from two hundred and thirty-one yards out. And, I realize, for one entire day, I didn't need him to feel like I mattered. Fuck you, Gavin McClain.

Just.

Fuck.

You.

14

GAVIN

Idon't wait around the clubhouse after my round. Three under again, steady, forgettable, the kind of golf that keeps me safely mid-pack and gives the press nothing to ask me about, which suits me fine today. I shower, change, and get in the rental car before Julio’s even finished breaking down my bag.

I don’t have any plan beyond not being here, getting away from clubhouse decks and leaderboards and any chance of seeing TJ, messing with his head. Or mine. I end up at a diner outside Silvis that looks like it hasn’t changed its menu since 1985, and order a burger I don't really taste. I sit in a booth by myself, scrolling through nothing on my phone for the better part of an hour.

It’s not helping. Nothing’s helping today.

I ask the waitress if there’s anything worth doing nearby that isn’t golf. She mentions a nearby sports bar, then, almost as an afterthought, a bar in Rock Island that gets a decent Saturday crowd, rainbow flag out front, karaoke some nights. I don’t know what makes me actually go, except that I don’t want to be alone with just my fucked up head, and a straight sports bar full of golf talk sounds worse than usual right now.

It’s small and unpretentious, with a few string lights and an old-style push-button jukebox instead of anything fancier. Only a cute twink looks twice at me when I walk in, which is exactly what I need. I take a stool at the end of the bar, order a bourbon, and let the low hum of conversations wash over me.

It works for about twenty minutes.

Then the TV mounted above the bar cuts to a golf highlight package, and there he is. TJ, mid-swing on some hole I don't recognize from this angle, the ball tracking dead center down a fairway. The graphic at the bottom of the screen catches up a second later: DOUBLE EAGLE, HOLE 12, T. HARRINGTON.