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At a pre-reunion party the night before, Adrian had been assured that the Scoggin Country Club was changed hardly at all. Tommy McDougall had said, “It’s like you’ve never been away, believe me.” “A new face in the pro shop, a stranger or two behind the bar,” Phil Henderson told him. “Otherwise, it’s nineteen-seventies day-zha-view. Same old same.” And, finally, Bob Ferris clapped him on the shoulder and said, “Even the infamous caddy shed—home of the sophomore circle-jerk.”

But everything else had changed. Driving the eight miles from downtown Scoggin—he’d left a little early because he was afraid of getting lost—he scarcely knew where he was. Tacky housing developments lined both sides of the highway, and a new overpass at the intersection with the Berwick road had demolished the landmark Mobil station with its flying red horse. All the old woodlots were gone, except—at last—in the immediate neighborhood of the Country Club, and even here the woods seemed sparser, as if at some time in the distant past fire had ravaged them.

True enough: the years had not changed the Club itself. Driving the rented sedan up the gravel drive past the portable sign—Welcome SHS Class of ‘80—Adrian might still have been in his teens, sulking on the passenger side of his dad’s Dodge, dreading another Saturday morning. Here were the tall pines along the southern border of the course, the row of maples and the low granite wall that lined the first and second fairways, the long grassy slope from the ninth green up to the clubhouse, where golfers plodded to the lounge and decided whether to play eighteen or call it a day over drinks. Here was the [End Page 518] parking lot, marked off with the round stones—one summer he had helped paint them white—that looked like ostrich eggs. And here was the clubhouse, all fieldstone and weathered timbers, unaltered by the twenty-five years since he had last been here: prom night, drinking too much in the Flagstick Lounge, making clumsy moves on Laura LeBrun—who wasn’t even his date, for God’s sake.

At the pro shop a blond girl—sixteen, seventeen?—leaned behind the counter, chewing gum, leafing glumly through the pages of a glamour magazine. Adrian browsed the shop’s merchandise—Medalist gloves, Titleist golf balls, Callaway clubs, visored caps, and t-shirts electric with manufacturers’ logos. The place smelled of leather and sizing and air freshener.

Now he waited at the counter for the girl to give him her attention. She wore a striped top that looked too small for her; when she lowered the magazine to acknowledge him, a silver ring glittered in her navel.

“I think we’re scheduled for a three o’clock tee-off,” he told her. “I’m a little early.”

“Name?”

“Cole. Adrian Cole.”

The blond girl ran her finger down the blue-lined page of a notebook. “Cole,” she said. “Three p.m.” She looked up at him. “Your buds aren’t here yet.”

“My what?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Your friends,” she said. “They haven’t arrived.”

“Oh. Thanks.” Buds. Buddies. Even as he went through the business of renting clubs and shoes, he felt foolish, old and out of touch.

“Adrian? Adrian Cole? Isn’t that you?”

The sound of his own name startled him, but the voice, even after so many years, was one he recognized instantly: Margaret Rodgers. The [End Page 519] blond clerk gave him an encouraging smile, and his face felt suddenly hot. Reunion indeed.

She was heavier now, her hair cut shorter, graying, but she had the same green eyes, the same full mouth, the same blemish just at the edge of her left cheekbone. At sixteen he had wished her to have the mole removed; at this unexpected moment he saw it as a beauty mark.

“Margaret Rodgers,” he said.

“Used to be. It’s Hedges now, remember?” She tilted her head and grinned at him. “How some females still take the husband’s name?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“But I was always the...

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