Father Lynch was the youngest of eight children and his oldest brother Seamus had also become a priest. This year was his 50th Jubilee and for that occasion Father Lynch had marked off ten days to travel to Ireland to be present at his brother’s celebration.
It rained more than usual in County Clare during that week, though the sun did come out for a couple hours on the afternoon of the Jubilee celebration proper.
The Lord was even kinder in the realm of St. Patrick’s in the Fields that week. Not only was the early summer weather blissfully mild but there were no parishioner tragedies or human dislocations of which to speak. There weren’t even any long confessions and those that did last more than five minutes concerned only small beads of venial sins, the worst of which was young Timmy Volchamp’s misguided prank against his Spanish teacher, one that left the teacher in tears and Timmy himself a bit distraught that the prank had worked so much better than he thought it would. At least he seemed a bit distraught as he expressed his remorse and accepted his penance.
Given the increase in his responsibilities that week, Stuart had not planned to visit the links, except on Tuesday for an hour or so to work on his short game. Tommy Divits was a firm believer in the little magical possibilities of the lob wedge, and Stuart was intrigued enough to want to give a try. Yet, there’s so much extra daylight in June. It made Tommy Divits’s other invitation worth considering, especially given that no trouble was about.
Three days after Father Lynch returned he was walking and whistling toward his Studebaker for a short trip to a book store when Marta called out to him from the door way of the parish’s small service building. In cheerfully broken English she explained that she had found something on the floor in the laundry room that belonged to him.
It was a folded scorecard from The Links at Birch Meadows. Must have been an extra, he figured, although he didn’t usually keep score on two cards. But the score looked right, 85. What didn’t look quite right was the handwriting, and, wow, certainly not the splits on the nines.
No, this wasn’t his scorecard. Never in his life could Father Lynch remember playing a front nine as badly as 52, nor a back nine as perfected as a 33. His first thought was that Bert Mallox had involved Marta in a prank. But that suspicion lasted only a few seconds until he recognized that the handwriting belonged to Stuart.
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