All the weeks before, we’d been busy up on the grass courts: plugging bare and worn-down spots, adjusting net sleeves, replacing and repairing broken nets. The mixed-doubles tournament was approaching, and with that the eyes of the members turned to the grass courts. They began warming up on Monday and Tuesday, playing practice matches and working on their serves and backhands and forehands, drop shots and between-the-leg shots. We watched this as we moved off the courts and onto the grass and patio outside of the ballroom, out along the back porch, and all the way around the clubhouse to the privet hedges just before the first tee. On Friday evening, the members would gather there for the end-of-the-tournament social, and so we were there, cleaning the brick, clipping the rose bushes, touching up the mulch. 

And then on Wednesday, when the matches started, I was up there with Fin, who had spent the summer bringing me along on jobs, explaining what he’d learned over the twenty-five years that he’d worked at the club, as if he expected me to one day be in his spot. The pro shop liked to have one of us by the courts on tournament days. If a net broke or needed adjustment, if the trash got too filled or a cooler too low, we were there to fix it. That rarely happened, Fin said, but he wouldn’t say that to Brett, and he wouldn’t know, spending more time in the office or in meetings than out on the grounds. Fin felt he’d earned the easy jobs when they came along. But he got bored up there, sitting under a myrtle in a backed-in cart, geraniums on either side, and that day when he told Brett he was heading out, he pointed to me and said, “Hank’s coming with me.”

I wish he hadn’t brought me along, but I couldn’t say no. 

Three weeks before in late July, when I realized that I wouldn’t be able pay my rent, I told Fin that if I could sleep on his couch, I’d give him a hundred bucks a month. He said I could stay for free, and I threw everything I owned into boxes and trash bags and a duffel and moved into his place a little way down the avenue. 

The apartment was as I expected: a one-bedroom shithole with clothes, whether clean or dirty I couldn’t tell, piled in a corner of the living room and scattered over the couch and chair he said he’d taken from the dumpster at the club. Much of the apartment appeared as if it hadn’t been cleaned all summer, or even before, and Fin said it was too much to carry his clothes to the laundry on the other side of the building, it was too much to wipe down the floors or the counter or toilet when it’d all get dirty the next day. The air conditioning sometimes worked, but mostly the damp basement air wadded around me. My own apartment had been just as disorderly, but there was more to seeing Fin amid his mess, cursing and muttering just as he did at work, his misery more alive at home. His complaints were the same as they were in the shop: how the branch from the maple on fifteen that cracked his shoulder affected his drives, that his ex-wife was a no-good whore who had taken his son from him, that he should’ve left a long time ago. He said all of this from his chair while I sprawled out on the couch. I nodded along. I agreed with him when he seemed to ask for it. I waited for him to stop so I could yawn and say, “Well, I guess it’s time for bed.”

After a few days, I didn’t want to stay there, but I didn’t know where else to go. My mother had always said I should move back home, live there like I had through college, save some money, figure out what I could do next, but my father told her they weren’t running a bed and breakfast for their kids and that it was about time I figured my life out. I’d roomed with friends, too, but eventually they moved out to live with girlfriends or downtown, and their rents, even split, would be too much. Still, I told Fin I wouldn’t stay long. He said the couch was mine as long as I needed.

But at the end of that first week he told me that his mother needed him to move in with her and he was leaving when his lease was up on the fifteenth, a week from Friday. He said I could take it on if I wanted. He didn’t think his mother would last much longer, and when she went, he hoped to get the house. “My brothers and sister, they all got their own places,” he said, picking at a bit of paint stuck along his jawline, blended in with the graying, day-old scruff, and flicked it onto the ground. “Families and shit, they ain’t moving back to that dump. But I’ll take it. If I’m moving in with that woman, I’m getting it, that’s for damn sure.”

I told him I’d think about it, but I wouldn’t. I stared at the ceiling, at a water stain that seemed new, its outer edges joining with another. Three weeks there would be enough, and I feared any longer and I’d become more like Fin, leaving work every day to sit in a damp basement room that I, too, wouldn’t ever clean. I hoped my old apartment would still be open when I had the money, maybe by the following month, and until then, I could figure something out. As if he knew my thoughts, Fin said, “You know, Hank, you could always stay at the shop. I’ve spent a few nights there, Lonny has and Alberto and Gil and most of the others have, too. It’s not bad. You get a cart with a bench seat, curl up best you can.” He sighed, but then added with a laugh: “And you’re never late for work.”

“I have some prospects,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”

Days passed, and then, up on the courts, sweat gathered under my clothes and seeped out onto the sticky, plastic seats as Fin went on about his mother, how his brothers and sister were no-good assholes for dumping her on him, and what the hell did he know about taking care of an old lady, but I could only think that I had two more nights at his apartment before I was out again on my own. And if I showed up on my parents’ porch, stuffed duffel in hand, kicking a box of books, what would my father mutter before he showed me to my old room? I didn’t want to hear his voice. Instead I listened to Fin as he told me again what had happened to him and also pointed out the members he’d already told me about: the Robertsons and Martins, the Wilsons and Montgomerys. He said he’d known them for so long, had seen them age gracefully and not, had seen their kids grow up and get married and have kids of their own, all of them at the at the club because they’d always been there and always would.

Mrs. Montgomery sat between her daughter and son, arms around both, while her husband chatted nearby with Mr. Wilson. The children sat with their legs crossed, a slight bend toward their mother, and their heads tilted closer whenever she spoke. The calm of that moment before their matches began — but so many days I’d seen one or the other or all of them leave the clubhouse, silently angry, storming off to their house along the first fairway. The hostility never lasted, and the next day they’d be back at the pool or on the porch.

“Fuck,” Fin said. “If only I’d had that.” He lifted his hat and pushed his graying but full hair back. The lines of his face wrinkled. 

How often I’d thought that since I started at the club, back in March, when I’d taken a bus up the avenue and walked over from there. That morning was harsh and bitter with only a slight promise of the warm sun. The frozen, faded-green grass cracked under my feet as I passed by old, stone homes set back from the street and the Episcopalian church, all the way to the clubhouse. That walk through the neighborhood and then over the grounds of the club, the whole way, I felt like a stranger, the streets I walked on unknown to me though it was just up from where I grew up and then lived. But also as if what we wanted, what we expected from life was unknowable to the other, as if our lives were never meant to touch. All of this, until I got to the shop, the dingy outpost tucked away from the rest of the club, hidden among a grove of trees, its faded and stained paint, its cracked windows, the smell of grass and dirt and seed, of gas and oil, of greasy machines seeping through the walls and swirling around the building. I saw guys plodding and driving around stiffly, bundled up and miserable. They seemed discontented, as if no one wanted to be there, that they were there against their will. But while I was still there they filed in for lunch, and from the office I could hear the chatter that turned to laughter and joy, a room full of life. I didn’t understand any of it, but that didn’t matter.

All I said then, all I had to say: “I really just want the job.” 

The boss turned to me and said, “We need more guys like you around here,” and I’m thinking he means young and energetic, looking for work, but then he said, “This job doesn’t require a whole lot of thinking.” 

In the months that followed, then, at Sunday dinners at my parents’, how often I heard that from my father who asked if the Mexicans also had degrees in Theology, if we quoted Scripture as we pulled weeds. My sister, who had fucked up her way through school but now worked as a nurse in the E.R., hid a smile with her hand. I could’ve told them that Bernardo read Marquez at lunch and Fin had finished three years of college before he dropped out with the hopes of turning pro; that as me and Alberto drove and walked by cars, he rattled off what he knew about carburetors and fuel injectors and alternators, more excited than I ever saw him. I could’ve told him all of that, but I didn’t respond to these comments. My mother, who stayed silent, later asked me gently if I did have any plans. I told her I still didn’t know. My mother, who’d always thought so highly of me: “Maybe you should consider the seminary.” She was either the best Catholic or the worst — offering her only son to God, or assuming that because no one else wanted him at least God would take him.

I stopped going to the dinners after that night, and only spoke to my mother when I felt sorry for her and her loneliness, sitting on the porch, stitching patterns onto pillows while my father worked or slept on the couch and my sister stayed in her room except to work and eat. When I’d lived at home, she’d had me, and we sat in the living room playing pinochle. When I wasn’t in class or reading, when neither of us was at work, there we were — sometimes chatting but mostly we didn’t, comfortable in our silence.

Fin cleared his throat, and I realized he’d been quiet for nearly a minute. He’d been quieter since he told me I’d have to move out, but never silent. He lifted his hat again but didn’t place it back, instead squeezing the brim with his left hand while he rubbed his eyes with the right. Both of his feet rested on the hood of the cart, the steering column rising from between his legs, but then he shifted and dropped one foot to the floorboard. From around the corner of the garden bed I saw Alberto trudging along the path toward us, a backpack blower bouncing with each step. Fin said, “Oh, what’s this asshole doing?”

Alberto brightened when he saw us, and his pace quickened. He lifted his hat, his thinning hair stuck up at all angles, and turned it backwards. He was twenty-three and had a plump, boyish face, but the others on the crew called him “El Pelón” because he’d soon be bald.

“Need any blowing?” he said, glancing at the courts. He brought the nozzle close to his mouth and opened, flicking his tongue provocatively. “Hank?” he said. “Fin?”

“Get the fuck outta here with that,” Fin said. “Don’t come up here with that. They’re playing out there.”

Alberto shrugged, his rounded shoulders sagging under the weight. For days he’d been like that, his spine curved even without the blower. His mother had died that week. His cousin Pedro told us one morning, waiting outside the shop to catch everyone before they came in, and pushing through the door to the breakroom we saw Alberto, flanked by Bernardo and Arturo with their arms flung over his shoulders, his head bowed.

“Better for her to go early,” Fin said as we opened our lockers and grabbed a hat and sunglasses. “Yours still around?”

I’d never said anything about my family — or about me, really. I wanted them to know as little as possible. Nothing about the mother I resented or the father I feared, about college or grad school or my sister who had achieved more with less. If they did, what would they think of me then, how little I had after so much time? For all they knew, I could’ve drifted in out of nowhere and could disappear just as soon — the hope we all had to one day not come in, off somewhere else, in a better direction.

I told Fin my parents lived close to where he did. He nodded in an understanding way, as if he knew I felt the same about mine that he did his.

Since college I’d thought about moving away from the city, somewhere out of state, to see what it’d be like to really be on my own, but I never could, and I wanted to ask Alberto what it was like for him, living so far from home when his mother died. If he regretted it. If he knew he’d never see her again. If he remembered what they talked about the last time she called. Because when he came here all the way from Guadalajara and left her behind, he had to have known what would happen, though he could never feel that sorrow until it did, and then he’d have to wonder why he’d ever left home.

Alberto lifted his hand in a lazy salute and let it fall. “Okay, Mr. Gringo.” He patted Fin’s beat-up sneaker. “Hank, you learn from him. He should be the boss. He knows so much.”

Fin kicked at his hand and told him to fuck off, but he did it softly, smiling. Other than me, Alberto was one of the few on the crew that Fin spoke to. He said Bernardo smelled, Miguel talked too much, and he couldn’t understand Victor or Diego or Arturo. But he and Alberto got along well, better than anyone there. Fin liked to work on his own when he could, but sometimes he liked the company, and then it was me or Alberto who went along with him.

Fin motioned for Alberto to climb into the bed of the cart, saying, “Come on, watch a little.”

Alberto let out a booming, “Ha!” and turned abruptly toward the members, but no one looked our way. “This is gringo work,” he said. “They need help on the course maybe.”

Fin waved him away, and he left, going back the way he came.

“He don’t mean anything by that,” Fin said. 

“I don’t care,” I lied. Since I’d started, everyone on the crew told me I was just like Fin, a younger Fin, and I saw the bleak future of my life, so different from what I’d always hoped for. A life at the club, the tedium of those days, wasting the years I’d spent in the classroom, unable to figure out what to do next or how.

Fin kept talking: his shoulder, the members, his ageing mother. I wondered if when I spoke, if I sounded at all like him.

I nodded along. I didn’t want to tell him more. 

Out on the grass, the tennis pros attempted to move the members to their courts. Few listened, some began to meander over to where they needed to be. Mrs. Montgomery, still sitting with her children, was talking to Mrs. Robertson. Other members stood nearby, stretching. Her husband, off to her side and still speaking to Mr. Wilson as he backed away toward the nearby court, snapped his fingers, indicating for her to rise and come with him. 

She frowned at this gesture, but then smiled at Mrs. Robertson and her children and stood, following behind her husband. All summer I’d seen that smile, as if to say to her friends, “Everything is all right, you know how he is.” That charming smile heightened her beauty, softening the sharp features, but also hid her meanness that she so often unloaded on us if the flowers were misplaced or underwatered and sometimes on her children for reasons I didn’t know. She never spoke against her husband, though, no matter what he said. I couldn’t blame her. I’d seen that in my own mother from when I was a child to just weeks before, my father’s infamous temper raging at random — because there’d been an unruly passenger on the train that day or some problem at the switch that delayed them, because the union leaders had lost their balls and weren’t pushing enough for their demands, because their house needed work they couldn’t afford and the neighborhood had changed, and God help the family if something happened to him because his only son sure won’t be able to help. He wasn’t quiet about it and the neighbors in the twin next door and those separated by the narrow driveway and even those across the street would’ve heard every word, and we knew because we heard when Dennis Dougherty got too drunk or when Mrs. Amato found Mark’s Hustlers under his mattress. But this neighborhood around the club was silent, the houses spread out with wide yards and maples and oaks that lined the properties and kept their lives secret. Any unpleasantness at home went unnoticed until they arrived at the clubhouse, and no matter what they said about dinners around Rittenhouse or trips to Avalon or how well Bill Jr., Avery, and Madison were doing in college, everyone, even us, saw the sidelong glances and sneers and eye rolls. And did my mother, chatting with the neighbors or mailman as she sat on the porch after work, pleasantly offer the same remarks that she always had, that I was studying and working — her pride in me unwavering, despite what my father said or what I did — telling them what she’d told me, gently, “You can do whatever you want as long as you work hard.”  

Or Mark Amato, the only friend from high school I still spoke to, who won the Religion Award our senior year for his paper on women in the Gospel of Mark because he wanted to impress our female teacher.

Or my thesis advisor, a priest, who taught a class on the New Testament and grew frustrated as I changed my topic: “You have to consider the disciples who left their lives behind to follow Christ. They didn’t know what they were getting into, but they went full steam ahead. That’s what you need to do with this. You have an idea, so dive in.” 

Or my sister, studying nursing because her roommate was, too: “You can pray for my patients after I fuck something up.”

And my father, after his anger waned, almost gloating as he realized that what he’d said from the beginning, that if going to college was a waste of my time and money, then graduate school certainly was as well: Silence.

I went with Alberto to trim the brush along the cart paths on the course after the matches that day. Out in the valley, Alberto pulled off the path, tucking our cart headfirst into a split between two unwieldy shrubs. That whole stretch needed to be cut back a few feet, he said, and then we’d load the branches and leaves and weeds in the back. “And watch out for poison,” he said. “Cuidado, gringo. Be careful.”

Our trimmers buzzed, vibrating in our hands. We stood yards apart, guiding the blades in steady, even strokes, stepping away from each other as we cleared our sections. Soon he worked his way down the path, and I glanced at him, keeping pace, when suddenly he stopped and rested the engine of his trimmer on the grass, the pole propped against his shoulder. I shut mine off and laid it down. “Hey,” I said, “you okay?”

He tapped his ear and said, “I couldn’t hear her voice.”

We walked toward the cart. Again, he said, “I couldn’t hear her voice. The trimmer was loud. Too much noise.” He dropped the tailgate and sat on the edge, his hands pressed into his round cheeks. “It’s been four years. Only phone for four years.” He paused. His chest swelled as he breathed in. He breathed out; his body slumped. “I could hear it before, but today is the funeral and only my youngest brother can go and now I can’t hear it.” I thought he might cry, listening to his voice, the slight crack, but he cleared his throat and swallowed, blinking hard as he did. “I keep trying but can’t remember.” He lowered his head, still blinking, and I told him he’d remember it soon. “It’ll come back to you. Don’t force it,” I said. “It’ll come back.”

Alberto nodded in agreement. “I hope,” he said. He went back to his trimmer and yanked on the cord. I thought of my own mother’s voice — on the phone just that morning and a few weeks before when I last saw her. I could only hear the hope when she told me about jobs, when she questioned what I planned to do. The sighs when I told her that I wasn’t sure. I never knew what to say. And even if I wanted to hear that in my mother again, and I tried to think of how she sounded when I was in school, when everything was still ahead of me, but I couldn’t. It was only the voice I’d heard recently. I closed my eyes and shut out her voice. 

I called her the next day, tucked away in the corner of the shop. It’d been three weeks. She asked me where I’d been, what I’d been doing. Work, I said, and looking for new work, too. But I hadn’t been. I’d been working the long hours at the club, leaving for Fin’s later in the afternoon tired and dirty and sweaty. “That’s good to hear,” she finally said. “That’s good.”

I waited for her to ask when I’d be coming home, but she never did and so I stood back there, hidden from view, listening to the silence on either end.

I remember this one class on Morality in the Bible when all we talked about was Job and his suffering, how he’d taken it all, the God-fearing man that he was. We sat around a table, our Bibles open to Job’s story, flipping around the pages, notebooks out but very few open, leaning back in our chairs, legs crossed, hands and arms waving as we made points about Nietzsche’s idea of tragedy, Camus and the absurdity of life, if God even exists, and always back to Job and his life. But all the while I remained quiet, unsure of what to say, only listening and waiting, waiting to say something but then it was too late and we were onto a different idea or theory, tangents on and on and on, but no one said anything about themselves, about anything that had happened to them. And now, what I think about: I wonder what Lonny would say, what Fin and Alberto and all the others would say, what I’d say, or if I’d still sit there, quiet, doing nothing, waiting and waiting and waiting.

I didn’t get to the courts till late in the morning, but Fin still sat up there, parked back under the myrtle. He talked, slouched in the seat with his feet kicked up and covering the glove box, his mug squeezed between his thighs. He said much of what he’d said the previous days we sat up there and what he’d said at night. It was then that I realized that that week in August I spent more time with Fin than I did by myself and more time than I’d ever spent with someone else. There was little that I didn’t know about him, and if there was more that he hadn’t told me, if there anything he’d held back about his life, I couldn’t imagine what that could possibly be. There was growing up with a father who was never home and a mother who rarely left the house; when he’d found his escape in golf, first because his father played — he was a lefty, just like him, and collected his old clubs whenever he bought new ones — but then because he could play by himself and against himself, walking to the nearby public course where his father often played and enjoying the solitude, the challenge of shooting lower than the last round, but also hoping he’d see his father there with his friends from his office; how he earned a scholarship to college but three years later lost it for failing too many classes and then dropped out. All of this he told, and though I’d asked for none of it, I listened because there were times when I thought I’d end up like him, forty-four and pushing lawn mowers, dragging nets off and onto courts, bending over time after time to pick up trash and weeds, and what I could do to stop that, I wanted to know.

As he talked, we watched the matches, the men and women in their whites. The way they moved — there was a gracefulness to it all, the serves and backhands, the aces and drop shots. The pairs, it seemed, knew what to do and when, a closeness between them that made their movements natural. They belonged out there, all of them. This was where they were meant to be, and maybe we all were, too. We were born to suffer, were born to lose, and I wanted to come out from beneath the cover of the myrtle, to stand among them and make them notice me, to stand there with Fin, and they could see us as we were: tired, sweating, covered in stains and specks of dirt, our hands cut and tough. And all that they couldn’t see, all that we would tell them, and not just me and Fin and Alberto, but all the rest, too, and then they would know how we suffered. 

On the courts, the matches were beginning to end. Final points were won or lost, and pairs walked off, chatting amiably, and then one match remained — the Montgomerys against the Reed Phillips and Lucy Macdonald — one court down from the main one, and members pulled up chairs to sit in the high grass or watched from the porch. And then, in the final match that morning, Bill Montgomery sent a shot that went right down the line and stood there, knowing Lucy Macdonald wouldn’t get there in time, waiting for the ball to land, but it dropped just outside of the paint before skirting away and dribbling to the fence line. He stood there and stared, but then his racket was flung to ground, bits of turf flying out from the impact, yelling that the ball should’ve been in. The lines, he screamed, were crooked. We looked to him to the porch to those gathered along the edge of the courts, and they all watched in a hushed silence, waiting for it to pass, and we waited for them to turn to us, for him to turn to us in his anger, knowing that it had been one of us who had done the lines earlier that morning. But he faced his wife, asked her what the hell she’d done all day, how could he win all by himself? He glared at her, and she hunched her shoulders, bowed her head, and they walked off the court and past the others, along the path out to the golf course, where they disappeared beyond the privet hedge.

Fin turned to me. “Huh,” he said. “Never seen that. But he’s always been like that. A real fucking asshole. Had to happen eventually. I don’t know how she hasn’t left.”

“She isn’t any better,” I said. “She’s worse than him I think.”

“That’s all from him. He’s been like this since the beginning, she was different back then. And most beautiful girl at the club, too. Back when they got married, they did it here, and Joe who’s been at the club longer than me and was tending bar that night said they got into it right outside the ballroom, right before they were introduced.” Fin shook his head and laughed in disbelief. “All their guests inside drinking champagne and shit and he’s pissed about God knows what. She should’ve known then. She could’ve married anyone else, but he got her and kept her all these years.”

“He’s lucky,” I said. 

“Lucky don’t even begin to describe him. He can do what he wants, she ain’t leaving. None of them get divorced. They care too much about that kind of crap.” Fin took off his cap and fit it over his knee. “Imagine having that money. Don’t have to give a shit about anything.” He fiddled with his brim and whispered, “Fuck, I want that.” His voice was wistful. He knew what life he’d hoped for all those years before, and though that time had passed, for a while it’d been real, more real than any of the dreams I’d ever had. His misery, so close then, seemed to be mine more than his. My eyes became unfocused, dizzying, and I clenched them shut. When I opened them, the courts were as vibrant as ever, the members crisp in their whites, but beyond that there seemed to be a mist.

We sat there for a while after that, waiting for something more to happen, for the man and his wife to reappear, but they never did. I wanted to stay with them, to hear what they said, but they carried on, as if they’d expected it, and they wouldn’t say anything then. They’d wait until they were back home to wonder in hushed words what had happened to Bill and Helen Montgomery, even while knowing that what they saw was years in the making. I thought of the storms we’d seen that summer — the mornings dense, gray and bulging clouds building slowly into the afternoons when the skies broke up with a pent-up fury, unleashing a torrent of rain. There was a suddenness to those storms, even if we saw it coming, and from the breakroom or garage in the shop we watched the rain sweep in and scrape against the asphalt, the clogged gutters overflowing, the streams washing bits of trash and twigs and dirt down our driveway. But up on the courts there was nothing more to see, not for us. They wouldn’t let us see that, no matter how long we watched them from a distance, down the fairways and behind bushes. And so we left, pulling out from under the trees. and driving away from the porch, away from the members, and back on the path to the shop.

Later in the afternoon, after the final match had ended, I went with Alberto to limb up the magnolia that grew just short of the first green and right along the fence of one of the backyards to the stone houses that ran up the length of the fairway. We could see the members — changed out of their whites and into suits and dresses — down below, just beyond the first tee, gathered down by the tables that had been set up earlier that day and were now filled with food, a bar off to the side. The clubhouse stretched out behind and to the right of them, almost glimmering in the sun. From that distance it all appeared beautiful, the vastness and whiteness, the columns, the awning, the boxwoods, the rose bushes. But once you got close, you saw the faults, the blemishes — the chips in the paint, the cracks along the base, the weeds in the beds and dead branches.

We each had our shears, clipping excess and dying branches at the crotch, ducking as they fell beside us. Alberto hummed as he worked, our usual silence unchanged by his loss, and we only spoke to say “Aquí, aquí,” as we clipped. It was a comfortable silence we had, neither needing to speak unless necessary, understanding that sometimes there wasn’t a need to say anything. I was grateful for that, and I’m sure he was, too. We didn’t talk even though the course was mostly empty, and had been all day, as members spent the day up on the courts, watching the matches and now there for the social.

But then Alberto looked at me and stabbed his shears into the ground. “How long will you be here, Hank?”

“Whenever we’re done here, I think.”

“No, no. Not today. The job. How long will you work this job?”

I didn’t know, and I told him that. He wasn’t happy with my answer, I could tell, but what else could I say then? That I’d only gone back to school because I was unhappy with my job and hoped that something better, at some point, would present itself to me. That I couldn’t decide on anything now, knowing that if I tried and failed, if I hated whatever I started, what could I do but come back here, get back behind the mower, pick back up the weed-whacker, the shovel, the pruning shears. It was better, I thought, to never know failure, to be just another who never even had a chance, than try to succeed when there wasn’t any hope.

“Will you go back to Mexico?”

“No, no. I live here,” he said. “I stay here. I got my brother-in-law. He’s got an auto shop, and soon I’ll work there. More money, better work.” He looked as if he’d be ready to go then, but he picked up his shears and held them out. “Not yet, but soon he says. But I don’t leave here. My babies go to school here soon. I stay here. I live here now.”

I nodded, and we began again, snipping the branches with quick, even cuts. I didn’t want to talk anymore, and Alberto didn’t either. He’d said what he’d wanted to, and there wasn’t anything else he had to say.

From across the first and eighteenth fairway there was a low rumble of a cart, and we turned to see Fin crossing over, bouncing slightly with each dip in the ground. He pulled alongside us and pounded the top of the cooler he had in the back bed. “Cold water,” he said, pulling cups from the glove box. “Cool off, take a break.” Fin did this most afternoons, driving around to each group, taking a break from his work to keep us going in ours. He filled his mug and motioned for us to grab a cup.

He picked up our rake and began a pile of branches as we drank. “Staying much longer?” Fin said.

“Maybe when we’re done here,” I said. “Probably then.”

“I’ll stick around,” Fin said. “If you want.” His voice was high, uncertain, as if he feared Alberto would say no. Alberto motioned for him to continue his raking. Fin had pissed off everyone the crew at some point, and at times he’d go weeks ignoring someone, but he’d never do that with Alberto. He wouldn’t say he was sorry, and Alberto wouldn’t either, but they wouldn’t go long before they went on as if nothing had happened. 

And as we worked, there came a woman still in her whites from the backyard of the house between us and the first green, stepping out unsteadily from the line of rhododendrons that ran along the split-rail fence, but then forcefully, stomping toward us at an angle. It was Mrs. Montgomery, slowing as she reached the fairway, just beyond where we worked. She stopped and swayed, staring at the grass before her, hesitating. She seemed uncertain or afraid to move forward, like a young girl at the edge of the cold ocean, wanting to take that next step and dive in, wanting to just get it over with, and then she lifted her foot and tumbled onto the grass, sprawled out with her arms outstretched. We stared at her and each other, but no one moved. Alberto whispered, “La mujer borracha,” and shook his head solemnly. “She’s always drunk, that lady. I don’t know why her mister lets her drink.” He turned from her and said, “Qué pendeja.”

I looked down the fairway, listened for a difference in the chatter and laughter that carried up the fairway, and as I watched, the clumps of groups that had faced all directions now lined up along the privet and faced us, one hand to their brows, the other extended, pointing up. Two men moved toward a cart, and then the cart came along to us, bouncing wildly as it sped along the edge of the fairway, off and on the cart path, past us and to the woman.

The one man, her husband, jumped out as the cart slowed and ran to her. He grabbed her from behind and tried to lift her up.

“Just go,” he said to the other man, and off he went back down the hill. The man and his wife, him stooped over, half dragging, half carrying her off the course, us staring, not even caring that we stared. She screamed and writhed, turning to hit him, and as he backpedaled toward the rhododendrons, nearly falling, he looked over to us, his face contorted in pain, while each of us still watched, waiting.