The Nine Lessons (17 page)

Everyone in the room thought that was the funniest thing they’d ever heard, but for me it was the last straw. I tossed the book on the floor and stormed out of the house. Erin and I had come in the same car, but after being thoroughly humiliated by her in front of so many people, most of whom were complete strangers to me, I figured she could find her own ride home. I started the car and was backing up when she came hobbling out of the house, holding her belly carefully while moving as fast as she could manage.

“Stop!” she said. “Please stop!” She slapped her hand on the hood of the car to get my attention. “August… please. I’m so sorry.”

I rolled down the window. “It wasn’t enough that you lied to me about the husbands’ all coming here tonight to watch football? And it wasn’t enough to subject me to all sorts of womanly baby nonsense like melted chocolate poop? Now I’m
the idiot
? Very nice.”

Erin was crying. “I’m so sorry! I don’t know what I was thinking. I
wasn’t
thinking. I just wanted you here with me tonight, that’s all. That comment about the book was the dumbest thing I’ve ever said. I’m
soooo
sorry! Please, August, don’t go!”

“Maybe I should explain how I feel right now through a saying you’re familiar with. ‘To err is
Erin,
to really screw things up is my Erin, and to forgive takes time.’ ” I put the car into gear. “I love you, Schatzi, but right at this moment I don’t like you very much. Good night.” I rolled up the window and left.

Erin remained standing outside, sobbing all alone in the cold November air.

I was too emotionally wound up when I left Stacey’s house to go straight home, so I drove around for a while to clear my head. After stewing long and hard on the events of the evening, I eventually ended up at my father’s house.

“I need to play golf,” I said when the front door opened. “I’m ready for my next lesson.”

He was pleased to see me, but more than a little surprised. “At eight-thirty at night? What’s going on?”

We stepped into the parlor, where I related to him how I’d been suckered into attending Erin’s baby shower and what an awful experience it turned out to be. I told him about the football game, the hordes of women laughing, the peas, sucking on bottles, and, of course,
The Idiot’s Guide to Changing Diapers
. When I was through telling him how I left Erin alone at the party he was not entirely sure that golf was the most appropriate way to handle things.

“Rather than playing golf, don’t you think you should go back and talk to her?”

“I’m not ready to talk,” I said stubbornly. “Besides, I thought you said golf has the answers to everything. So why not this? What happened to ‘golf is life’?”

London considered my question carefully. “Golf can teach us a lot. I just think that in this case we both know what needs to be done to remedy the situation, so playing a round of golf in the dark is only delaying the inevitable. Augusta, you need to talk to her.”

“I know,” I sighed. “But right now I honestly don’t know what I would say that wouldn’t make the situation worse.”

“I see,” he said slowly. “In that case, maybe you’re right. Let’s go golfing.”

We both got into his car and drove together. He wouldn’t tell me which course we were going to sneak onto in the darkness, but he assured me he had a plan. Ten minutes later we pulled up in front of Pete’s Putts, an eighteen-hole indoor putting course.

“This is your plan?” I laughed. “Miniature golf?”

“Don’t you worry about that,” he counseled with a smile. “The size of the course has no bearing on the size of the solution.”

The teenage boy working the register inside warned us that we only had forty-five minutes before closing. He handed us each a pastel-colored ball and a putter. Before starting we took several minutes to survey the course. The design itself was a bit of an artistic wonder; each hole had a beautiful miniature replica of an iconic city or location from somewhere in the world.

The Eiffel Tower loomed over the first hole’s cup, after passing through the Louvre and the narrow streets of Paris. The second fairway rolled down the middle of the Grand Canyon, while the third forced golfers around the monoliths of Stonehenge. Other notable features included detailed reproductions of Niagara Falls, Mount Everest, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Red Square, the Great Wall of China, the Parthenon, and a wonderful scale model of Venice, complete with floating buses and handcrafted gondolas.

To my great delight, the level of competition was much more even between my father and me with holes whose length was measured in tens of feet as opposed to hundreds of yards. After five holes I was only down by three strokes, and by the eleventh hole I’d pulled to within one.

The twelfth hole was the most challenging one on the course. Scores of small bobble-head people, labeled senators, were set up as obstacles along the narrow fairway, blocking a direct shot to the cup that lay just inside the front door of the White House. As I was drawing my putter back to swing in the direction of the First Lady, whose mechanical head was nodding up and down in time with her waving arm, a sneeze erupted in my nose. I tapped the ball errantly on the first “Ah-choo!” and it took off bouncing in the wrong direction. It hit a congressman in the leg and then vaulted over a little fence, finally coming to a full stop in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue.

“Golf dang it!” I snapped when the sneezes ended. “That’s gonna set me back two or three strokes! Maybe more.”

I expected my father to find the whole thing very funny, but he wasn’t laughing at all. “Augusta, take a mulligan,” he said.

I could hardly believe my ears. I didn’t even think the word mulligan was in my father’s vocabulary, and the thought of him allowing one on the golf course—even a miniature one—was beyond reason. “A mulligan? Seriously? I didn’t think you believed in do-overs.”

“Oh, c’mon, this isn’t a PGA event, for cripes’ sakes. We’re just having fun. You made a mistake and I think you should take a mulligan. You’ve got no chance of winning tonight without one.”

“You’re totally serious?” I asked again skeptically.

He nodded in unison with the First Lady.

With his blessing I retrieved my ball and set up the shot again. This time it went right where I intended, banking off a near wall and rolling to a stop near the Lincoln Memorial. I finished the hole with a respectable three, bettering my father by one stroke on the hole and moving us to even for the round.

After he wrote down our scores London glanced briefly at the replica of Big Ben on the next hole. It was five minutes to ten o’clock. “I think we should call it a night,” he said. “We’ve both played well, and the lesson is over.”

“Over? But I have a chance to win here. Besides, I still don’t know what I’m going to say to Erin when I get home.”

London lifted his eyebrows questioningly, as if to say, “Weren’t you paying attention tonight?”

I thought about each of the holes we’d played, trying to puzzle out what I might have gleaned from putting around the world that would lend itself to smoothing things over between Erin and me. I couldn’t come up with anything.

“Oh, criminy,” said my father impatiently when he saw my blank stare. “Augusta, this isn’t rocket science. You need to go give Erin a bloody mulligan! I’m sure she’s waiting for one.”

“I don’t follow,” I said honestly. “You want me to give her a do-over?”

He shook his head. “Think big picture. In golf, a mulligan is a do-over, yes, but it’s also much more than that. It’s an opportunity to make amends without penalty. It’s an act of mercy granted from your golf partner when a mistake is made.” He paused. “Mulligans in life can come in many different forms but I think they all boil down to essentially the same thing—
forgiveness
.”

I squatted next to the Potomac River and dipped my fingers in the cool water. “Forgive her? Just like that?”

“Just like that,” he repeated. “Put it behind you quickly and move on to the next shot. In this case, hopefully she’ll give you a mulligan, too, for driving off and leaving her alone at the bloody baby shower.”

I ran my fingers through my hair and exhaled slowly. “I don’t know. I mean, I know I should, I just don’t know if I can. Usually, when we’re really at odds, it’s me who’s done something stupid. I’m not sure I like this role reversal.”

“And doesn’t she usually let you off the hook?”

I nodded.

We agreed to call our game a tie and left Pete’s Putts immediately. My father drove us back to his house so I could get my car. On the way I wondered if there were any mulligans that he was waiting for in life. He spoke before I could ask him the question.

“It’s easy to talk about giving mulligans, but actually giving them is hard. You know,” he hesitated, “I’m… I’m not the same person I used to be. You were right to be mad at me all those years. I wasn’t there for you like I should have been. But… I’m changing. Do you suppose you could ever…?”

I shouldn’t have laughed, but I couldn’t help it. “You want me to forgive
you
?”

He kept his gaze forward as he drove. “There is at least one mulligan I’ve been waiting for since you were a freshman in high school.”

“The golf team?” I asked, sounding as though he’d said the most ridiculous thing in the world. “Ha! That was probably your worst offense. I knew you disliked the fact that I was terrible at golf, but it wasn’t until then that I fully understood just what an embarrassment I was to you. Forgive that? No. I don’t think so.”

He looked at me and then back at the road ahead. “Augusta,” he said carefully, “the thing about mulligans is that they are needed just as much by the giver as they are the givee. I’ve told you before that there was good reason for what I did and that I’ll explain it in due time. But there’s no use holding on to your animosity any longer. It’s not hurting anyone but yourself.”

Neither of us said another word for the better part of five minutes. I sat watching the dirty brown snow along the shoulder of the road pass by, wondering all the while if I had it in me to forgive my father for casting me aside like a broken tee at a time in my life when I desperately needed his approval. It seemed an impossible feat. Like my mother, I began methodically listing all of the reasons why I should or shouldn’t forgive London. I came up with plenty of reasons why I shouldn’t, but only one reason why I should.
Because he’s your father,
I thought. But was that enough? Yes, he was my father, but what kind of father had he been? And who was he to propose such ideas to me, when I’d never seen one whiff of forgiveness from him?

We were passing the bend in the road near the spot where I’d almost hit the thirsty moose months before, when I broke the silence. “I’ve read your journal entries about Mom’s death.”

“I know.”

“Then how can you talk to me about forgiveness?”

He slowed the car as we came to another bend, and then pulled his eyes away from the road to look at me. “What?”

“Admit it—you’re the poster child for harboring animosity.”

He glanced at me again. “Why would you say that?”

“Because it’s true!”

London didn’t verbalize his response. He didn’t have to—his face said it all. I could tell just by looking at him that he was hurt by my comments. The windows were fogging up so he cracked his open slightly, and then looked once more directly at me. His eyes interrogated mine, searching for something, but still he didn’t say a word.

“See! You don’t deny it,” I said, picking up where I’d left off. “You’re hanging on to more emotional baggage than any ten people combined.”

“That’s not true.”

I snickered. “Really? Then why are there a hundred pictures of Mom scattered all over the house? She died over twenty years ago, and you probably still blame God for that!”

London gripped the steering wheel tighter. His jaw was rigid and his teeth clenched.

“Or maybe it’s
her
that you’ve blamed all these years?”

“Why would I blame her?” he asked incredulously.

I paused to think, and the thought that came to my mind was something I’d never considered before. But somehow, in that moment, it made complete sense to me. “Because,” I said quietly, looking down at the floorboard, “she left you with
me
.”

He didn’t respond. I could barely stand to look at him, for fear that his face would confirm what I’d just said. When I did manage to look up, London was shaking his head slowly. Tears were welling up in his eyes, trapped there by his thick eyelashes. We were nearly home, and neither of us said anything more.

We pulled into his driveway and I quickly got out and walked to my car. London got out too, slowly. He stared at me for what felt like an eternity, grimacing as though he wanted to say something more but couldn’t bring himself to it. He motioned slightly with his hand to say good-bye, and then he walked in measured steps to the house and opened the door. I watched him the whole way. Just before entering the house he stopped and turned around.

“Augusta?” he asked through the darkness. I didn’t say anything, but he knew I was listening. “You once asked me if the sun ever came back out after your mum died.”