My son’s wife had just poured ICED TEA over my head in the middle of the club lounge when my son told me I should go — and the only one who came after me was the manager, holding a few sheets of paper.
The dues on that club are in MY name.
They were Walter’s, and when he died I kept paying so Scott could keep the courts he grew up on and Courtney could have a place she said felt like hers.
Since spring the bill had come in a thicker envelope. I paid it and figured the rates went up.
Scott phoned Wednesday and wanted me to come watch Courtney’s doubles final and stay for lunch.
So I wore the pale blue linen and Walter’s pearls.
Courtney came in off the courts in her whites and her visor, saw me by the bar, and didn’t say hello.
She took the pitcher off the tray and tipped the WHOLE thing over my head.
The ice was the little half-moon kind.
I didn’t move. I could feel the pearls still in my ears.
“You were not invited to this,” Courtney said. She pointed back at her mother, Marcy, at the table with her wine. “This lunch is for my mother.”
Marcy didn’t get up.
Four or five members quit chewing.
“My son asked me to come,” I said.
Courtney jabbed a finger at my face. It stopped an inch short.
“You get one,” I said. “There will not be two.” Then I looked at Scott, three feet away in his navy polo, not one word out of him. “Is that what you want?”
He looked at Courtney first. Then at me, arms hanging the way they did at nine when he’d broken something. “Mom, I think you should go.”
So I got my handbag.
My shoes left wet prints all the way to the terrace doors.
The manager reached me at the door, navy blazer, gold buttons, and he did not keep it down.
“Your account paid for NINETEEN PRIVATE LESSONS.”
Scott looked at his wife. “Whose lessons?”
Courtney went pale.
And behind her, Marcy set her wineglass down.
The terrace doors
Nobody answered him.
The manager didn’t wait for them to. He was looking at me, not at Scott. He didn’t hand me the pages. He read off the top one.
“Mrs. Dunleavy, I’m Glenn Haskins. We’ve met twice.” He tapped a line with one finger. “Private lessons with Luis. Tuesdays at ten, since the middle of April. Nineteen of them. The guest is Marcy Pruett. They’re signed Courtney Dunleavy, guest of the Dunleavy account. Ninety-five for the lesson and twenty-five for the guest fee.”
A hundred and twenty dollars, nineteen times. I did it in my head the way Walter used to, round up and take a little off.
Two thousand two hundred and eighty.
That was my thicker envelope.
Behind me, Scott said, “Marcy doesn’t play.”
“She plays Tuesdays,” Glenn said.
Iced tea ran off my chin onto his pages. He moved them an inch and didn’t say anything about it.
I turned around. Courtney was standing in front of her mother’s banquette with nothing in her hands. The pitcher was back on the bar next to the silver tray. I don’t know who put it there.
Marcy had both hands in her lap.
“Mom,” Scott said. “Mom, I didn’t know about any lessons.”
I didn’t answer him either.
Glenn folded the pages in half, then looked at the members at the near tables, who had all found something to do with their forks. He lowered his voice for the first time.
“Mrs. Dunleavy, would you come to my office? There’s a second page.”
Walter’s number
Walter joined Linden Hill in 1994, the year Scott turned three.
It cost him everything we had saved for a second car. It was an equity membership, which meant he didn’t rent it by the month like people do at a gym. He bought a share of the club, and the share was his. He carried the certificate home in a manila envelope and put it in the top drawer of his desk, and it is still there.
Member number 0417. He made me learn it the way you learn a phone number.
When Scott turned twenty-one Walter kept him on as an adult child of the member, and when he married, Courtney came onto the account with him. That’s a category the club has. I paid for it.
Scott learned to play on court six, the one by the parking lot where the balls go over the fence. Walter and I played mixed doubles on Saturdays for twenty-two years. We were not good. We were loud.
Then Walter’s knee went, and then the surgery on Walter’s knee went wrong, and after that he watched from the terrace and I stopped. I didn’t want to play with anybody else. I still don’t know if that’s a reason or an excuse.
Walter died six years ago in March.
The dues are $1,140 a month, and the statement comes on the tenth. I write a check the same day. I don’t do the online thing. I have a register I keep in pencil because Walter kept one in pencil, and I tick off the check number when it clears.
I kept paying because Scott still played. Because Courtney said the first time she walked into that lounge that it felt like somewhere she belonged, and I remember thinking, good, somebody should feel that way about it.
In April, on a Sunday, I was at their house for pot roast. Courtney had a clipboard on the kitchen counter.
“The club’s redoing the parking stickers,” she said. “They need the member to sign. I told them I’d get it done so you don’t have to drive over.”
I didn’t have my reading glasses. They were in the car.
“Where?” I said.
She put her finger on a line near the bottom of the page. I signed once. She said thank you and took the clipboard into the other room, and we ate.
Scott was at the table the whole time, doing something on his phone.
Now I was walking down a hallway at Linden Hill with a wet dress stuck to the backs of my legs, past the framed photos of club champions going back to 1962, and Walter was in one of them, second row, 1998, with a mustache I made him shave off.
Glenn held the door.
Tuesdays at ten
His office was small and cold. He gave me a towel from a stack on a shelf, white with the green club crest, the same towels they hand out at the pool.
I put it around my shoulders and sat.
He laid the first page flat on the desk and turned it around so it faced me. It was the itemized part of my statements, the part I never read because the total was the only number I paid. My glasses were in the Buick, so he ran his finger down it and read it out.
“Tuesday, April 21. Private lesson, L. Ortiz. Guest, M. Pruett. Tuesday, April 28. The same.”
It went down the page through the end of August. Every Tuesday. Two Tuesdays in July were missing, and then in August there were two Thursdays as well.
“Luis mentioned she was improving,” Glenn said. “I didn’t think anything of it. Members bring family all the time.”
“Guests are capped at twelve visits a year,” he said. “Lessons with the pro don’t count against it. People know that.”
“She’s not my family,” I said.
He didn’t write that down, but he looked at it for a second as if he might.
“When did the first one start?”
“The twenty-first of April.”
The Sunday with the clipboard was the twelfth. I know because it was the day after Scott’s birthday and I’d brought the leftover cake.
Nine days.
I heard Scott before the door opened. He knocked, which he has never done in his life, and came in without waiting for an answer. He’d pushed his hair back with both hands and it was standing up.
“Mom, I swear to God I didn’t know about the lessons.”
“You said that.”
“Courtney’s out there with her mother. She’s—” He stopped. “I don’t know what she is.”
Glenn stood up. “Do you want me to step out?”
“No,” I said.
Scott leaned on the file cabinet. He picked at the corner of a club calendar pinned to the wall.
“I signed something too,” he said. “Back in the spring. It was just the household part. Courtney said it was to keep her on the account.”
“Keep her on it.”
“So she could still charge lunch and stuff. After.”
After what, I didn’t ask. He stopped picking at the calendar.
“What household thing, Scott?”
Two o’clock
He didn’t answer, so Glenn did, sort of.
“Courtney had me booked at two today,” he said. “After the lunch. She asked for it on the twenty-eighth of August, when she brought in a request with your name on it. I had the file ready. That’s why I had it printed.” He put his hand flat on a green folder at the corner of the desk. “Nothing goes to the member in writing until that meeting’s done. That’s how we do it. I should have called you anyway.”
“Who was coming to the meeting?”
“Courtney. Scott. Mrs. Pruett.”
Not me.
Scott made a noise at the file cabinet.
I asked about the money first. I’m sixty-two and I’ve paid my own bills since Walter got sick, and I know when somebody’s about to tell me a thing I don’t want to hear.
He told me anyway. My bank would not help me. I wrote those checks myself, every month, with my own pen. You can’t call a bank and say you didn’t mean it.
The club was a maybe. Under the bylaws, a member answers for whatever her household signs for, lunch and tennis balls and guests. Courtney was household because I’d let her be.
“If you put in writing that you never allowed guest lessons, I take it to the board and ask them to rebill whoever signed,” he said. “They usually do. I can’t promise you they will.”
“And if I take her off the account?”
“Then she can’t sign for anything. That’s one form. It takes me a minute.”
I pulled the towel tighter. It smelled like chlorine.
“What’s in the folder, Glenn?”
He looked at Scott. Scott looked at the floor. Then Glenn opened the folder and took out two pages clipped together. They had the club letterhead on top, the same green as the towel.
He turned the folder around.
April 12
REQUEST FOR TRANSFER OF EQUITY MEMBERSHIP.
Member number 0417.
From: Patrice A. Dunleavy.
To: Scott W. Dunleavy and Courtney L. Dunleavy, with Marcy Pruett named as the household’s designated adult.
Then a paragraph, typed. I couldn’t read it. I read it with Glenn’s reading glasses, which he took off his own face and handed across the desk without a word.
My late husband and I were members of Linden Hill for many years. My health no longer allows me to use the club, and I have not played since his passing. I wish to transfer the membership to my son and his family effective November 1, so that the club can remain in the family.
My health.
I get my blood pressure checked twice a year and it’s fine. I walk two miles most mornings. I had driven myself here in Walter’s old Buick, forty minutes, and parked it myself.
The part about not playing was true. I haven’t held a racket since Walter’s knee.
Designated adult. The club lets a family name one more grown person on the membership, a parent or a sister, somebody who lives with them or near them. It gives that person full privileges. Courts, the pool, the dining room, league play.
Marcy, on the courts every Tuesday since April. Getting good enough to play, as a member, in the winter league I was paying for, the one that starts in November.
Under the typed paragraph there was a line, and on the line there was a signature.
Patrice A. Dunleavy. The P looped too far back the way it always does, because I was taught by nuns who liked a big P, and the y ran off the line because I couldn’t see the line.
It was my handwriting.
The co-applicant line
Glenn took the page back and laid it where we could both see it.
“A transfer needs the member at my desk, in person,” he said. “The board won’t vote on paper alone, because people put things in front of people. Courtney told me you weren’t well enough to come in. At two she was bringing Scott and her mother to ask me to take the family’s word for it.”
And instead I’d walked into the lounge in the pale blue linen, in front of half the membership committee.
They came in without knocking. Courtney first, then Marcy behind her with her purse held in front of her like a tray.
Courtney had taken off the visor. Her face was red now, not pale. She saw the page on the desk and she didn’t slow down.
“Okay, so she’s seen it. Good. That’s fine. We were going to get it done at two without any of this, and she wasn’t supposed to be at lunch, Scott, I told you that, I told you not to call her, and you called her anyway, and then she walks into Mom’s birthday in front of the Hendersons and the Coopers dressed like she owns the place.”
“She does own the place,” Glenn said.
“She doesn’t use it.” Courtney turned to me. “You don’t use it. You haven’t been here in two years. You pay for a club you never set foot in, for Walter, and Walter’s dead. Scott and I are here every weekend. My mom is here every week. Somebody should get to have it while they’re alive to enjoy it.”
Marcy said, “Courtney.”
“No, Mom, she should hear it. She signed it. She sat at our counter and signed it.”
“I thought it was a parking sticker,” I said.
“You didn’t ask.”
That was true too.
Scott had come off the file cabinet. He reached over my shoulder and turned the second page, the one clipped underneath, and I saw him do it before I saw what he was looking for.
At the bottom of page two there was a line that said CO-APPLICANT (TRANSFEREE). Two signatures. Courtney’s, round and neat. And Scott’s, the same scrawl he’d had since his learner’s permit, dated April 12, in the same blue pen as mine.
“You told me she was on board,” Scott said to his wife. “You said she wanted it. You said she was relieved.”
“She would have been.”
“You said that stuff about her health was your idea for the form. That it was just what the club needed to hear.”
“It is just what they needed to hear.”
“I don’t need to hear anything,” Glenn said.
Scott looked at me then. He was thirty-five years old and he looked the way he looked at nine, standing over a lamp.
“I knew about the transfer, Mom. I thought you wanted it. I asked you to come today because I thought—” He stopped and tried again. “I thought if you were at the lunch, it’d feel like you gave it to us.”
So that was the phone call on Wednesday. Come watch Courtney’s final. Stay for lunch.
Marcy put her purse down on the corner of Glenn’s desk. “I’ll pay for the lessons,” she said. “I didn’t know it was on her account. I thought it was the family account.”
“It is the family account,” I said.
Nobody said anything after that for a while.
I took the pen out of Glenn’s cup. I crossed a line through the typed paragraph, corner to corner, and wrote above it in capitals, WITHDRAWN BY MEMBER, and the date, and I signed it at his desk in front of him, which is how a member has to do it. My P went too far back again.
“The form to take her off,” I said.
He already had it out. I filled in Courtney’s name. Under reason, I wrote member’s request. I didn’t write anything else.
“And the one for the lessons.”
Glenn said I could write it on plain paper. I wrote four lines. I did not authorize guest lessons for Marcy Pruett at any time. I request the charges be removed from account 0417 and billed to the person who signed for them. Signed, dated.
Courtney said, “You’re doing this in front of him? Over nineteen tennis lessons?”
I didn’t answer her. I handed the page across the desk.
“Scott stays on,” I said. “He’s Walter’s son.”
Scott put his hand on the back of my chair and then took it away.
“Put her on the next statement, Glenn.”
The half-moon kind
The October statement came on the tenth, same as always.
It came in the thin envelope. One page. $1,140, a lunch Scott had signed for, a club sandwich and an iced tea, and a credit of $2,280 that said lessons, rebilled per board.
The board met on the sixth. Glenn called to tell me the only thing on the agenda for 0417 was the lessons, and it passed.
I’ve heard that Courtney got a bill for $2,280 and the Hendersons have heard about it too. I didn’t hear that from Scott. Scott hasn’t called. His birthday is next April and I don’t know yet whether I’ll bake.
On the third Tuesday of October I got Walter’s racket out of the hall closet. The strings were still good, which surprised me. The grip was his, worn down to the shape of a hand bigger than mine, and I wrapped a new one over it in the car.
I parked by court six.
Luis was at the pro shop counter when I came in. He looked at the name on his book and then at me.
“Ten o’clock,” he said. “Mrs. Dunleavy.”
“I haven’t played in ten years.”
“That’s fine. Nobody can hit the first day.”
The lounge was half empty at a quarter to ten. The windows were full of sun. Somebody had mopped where the floor had been wet, and you’d never know.
The bartender asked what I wanted. I said iced tea, and he poured it from the pitcher on the silver tray, and the ice was the little half-moon kind.
I drank half of it and he slid the chit across the bar. Guest of nobody. Member 0417.
I signed it, and the P went too far back.
If this one stayed with you, send it to somebody who’s been signing things without their glasses on. They’ll know why.
If you’re looking for more tales of family drama and unexpected twists, you might enjoy reading about how Travis Signed His Own Page at Seven-Forty That Morning or when My father took my call from the hospital with Brandon’s parents two chairs away, and see what happens when Renters Who Pay $740 A Week Watched Her Scrape My Plate Into Biscuit’s Bowl.
