The humidity of the Gulf coast had not lifted by six the next morning when I slipped back outside, carrying a mug of yesterday’s coffee that had gone cold on the dresser. The resort courtyard below was completely empty, the blue lounge chairs lined up like silent headstones around the dark, motionless water of the pool. A single yellow plastic beach ball floated in the deep end, pushed slowly toward the filter by the early morning breeze.
My blue paper itinerary sheets were already soft from the damp air as I laid them across my knees. I smoothed the edges of the printed pages, trying to focus on the dolphin cruise I had scheduled for two o’clock. The paper felt thin and fragile, much like the plans I had spent eight months putting together in our kitchen at home while Mark watched television in the other room.
Near my bare feet, propped against the stucco wall of the balcony, sat Mark’s heavy leather golf club travel bag. I had spent forty minutes the night before our departure wrestling its seventy-pound frame into our trunk, scraping my knuckles against the metal latch in the process while Mark took a work call in the driveway. It was a massive, dark green beast of a bag, smelling of expensive leather polish and grass.
The zipper of the travel bag was thick and made of heavy brass. It resisted my pull at first, catching on the canvas lining, but I tugged it back until a small gap opened. Inside, among the plastic bags of tees and a sleeve of white balls, was a folded piece of paper. It was the heavy bond paper Mark used in his home office, not the cheap lined pads we kept by the kitchen phone.
I reached down and pulled it free, expecting a receipt for golf balls or a bag tag from his last corporate outing in Ohio.
Instead, it was a folded printout of an email from Jason, sent to Mark’s personal address three weeks before we even purchased our family plane tickets.
My hand remained still on the damp paper as I read the subject line, which simply said Florida Tee Times.
The first line of the message was brief and written in Jason’s loud, casual style. He had confirmed three consecutive days of tee times at a luxury golf club two hours south of our resort, starting Thursday morning.
