Chapter 32

Sophie avoided me like the plague for the rest of the tournament, but I finally caught up to her for a brief moment as I was getting ready to leave Hawaii.

"I promise I'll see you in Arizona next year," she said as she pinched my butt. I gave her my cell phone number and told her to call anytime.

She gave me an enigmatic smile and just said, "Maybe."

I asked Amelie and Jill about her when they arrived in Phoenix.

"You better watch that one," Jill told me. "She's an awful flirt, but I think flirt is all she does."

Amelie told me she doubted Sophie would even remember me the next time she saw me.

"She seems to pick a guy out at every tournament," she said. "She flirts and teases, then disappears."

I told her that was exactly what happened.

"She slipped her panties into my pocket," I told them. "By the time I realized what she had done, she was gone. I thought another golfer girlfriend might be in the works."

Amelie hadn't joined the tour when I spent the summer with Bailey, so I filled her in.

"Ah, the infamous Bailey Stenstrom," she said but refused to elaborate when I asked why she was infamous.

"Let's just say she's, uh, temperamental," Amelie told me.

I remarked that when Amelie Robinson says you're temperamental, you must be a holy terror.

One of the pros pulled out of the tournament at the last minute, so I sat out the pro-am tournament. Instead I spent the day in the hospitality tent with Jill, getting drunk for the first time since I was a freshman in high school.

Jill wasn't as cute as Amelie, but she was attractive in her own way. She was pretty buzzed herself when Amelie came off the course.

We stopped at a liquor store on the way home so Amelie could join the party since she had a late practice round that night. I put some steaks on the grill and the three of us drank until almost 10 p.m.

"I'm still trying to get pregnant," Amelie said at some point. "But once I am, we've decided we still want to have sex with you."

I jokingly told them there was no reason we couldn't practice a little, but Amelie said I had to wait until she was sure she was pregnant.

As it was, I got to lie in the same bed while she and Jill made love that night. I'm pretty sure they thought I was asleep, but I damned sure wasn't. It was all I could do to keep my hands to myself — and off myself — during the action. I woke up with a very naked Amelie and a very naked Jill on each side of me in the morning. A very clothed Jay Jr. was one unhappy camper.

The women stayed with me for another week after the tournament before heading to northern Arizona. They asked if I wanted to go with them, but since they'd started having sex regularly beside me I figured some time alone wouldn't hurt them — or me — a bit.

I told them they were welcome at my house any time. I knew Amelie resided in France and Jill was from the East Coast.

"As far as I'm concerned, you can consider this your home away from home," I said. "Anytime it's more convenient for you to make this a home base for awhile, you're welcome to. Even if I'm not in town, you're welcome here."

I'd hoped for a going-away screwing from at least one of them but it was not to be. I sure hoped Amelie would get pregnant in a hurry, though.

I was a complete bum for the next month. There were times I wouldn't bathe for two days. I would spend my afternoons in the pool and my evenings on the couch. After a month I was more than ready to get back into the grind. The Cardinals making the playoffs and my agreement to appear in golf tournaments meant I'd have to wait another year to finish law school.

I was one semester away from my juris doctor, thanks to some creative scheduling from the University of Arizona. I probably could have finished during the time off, but I wanted to make sure I could devote my full attention to my final semester.

I was entering the final year of my contract and the Cardinals had offered me an obscene amount of money to re-sign. Because of the structure of a couple other contracts in the NFL, there was no way the Cardinals could afford to designate me their franchise or transition player. That meant my contract would be the average of the top five or 10 contracts at my position in the league.

The main sticking point was the length of the contract. I was willing to take less money for fewer years. The Cardinals wanted to lock me into a six-year deal with a team option for the seventh. For the amount of money they were offering it was a generous offer.

There were two problems we couldn't resolve. The first problem resided with me exclusively. I truly doubted I would want to be playing football in six years. My interest in football was the proverbial roller coaster. Some days I couldn't imagine doing anything else. Some days I couldn't imagine playing another season.

The other problem was entirely with the Cardinals. They wanted to backload the contract with a good portion of it deferred for 10 years. I don't know many employees that would work today to be paid 10 years from now. But the stadium proposal had been nixed by the voters and ownership was threatening to move the team somewhere else. They wanted to defer my salary in order to help pay for a new stadium in either Phoenix, or most likely Los Angeles. It didn't matter to me if it was on the moon, I didn't like the idea and I refused to sign any contract with more than 5 percent deferred. Even the 5 percent had to be paid within five years. About the last thing I wanted to be doing was playing football somewhere else and being paid by the Cardinals.

Somehow that seemed like a huge conflict of interest for me.

The Cardinals wanted to make plans to draft a quarterback early in April if I hadn't re-signed. I basically told them to knock themselves out. I wasn't afraid of competition, but I knew if they paid big bucks for a first-rounder that my days in Phoenix were numbered.

We had a lot bigger holes to fill, so I gambled the Cardinals were bluffing. I was right. They picked up a young QB from BYU in the sixth round and I figured the team and I could either exercise our option at the end of the season or work out a new deal.

My visit with the Fergusons was strained. Mack and Ellie seemed as glad to see me leave as they were to see me come. Beth avoided me whenever possible. I wound up leaving a day before I'd planned to. The visit with Sara and her parents went much the same way. Her mother and stepfather had separated and it was tense around the house. I always stayed in a nearby hotel when I visited, and Sara spent as much time with me as she did at home.

We talked about colleges and although I knew where she wanted to go, I urged her to look around.

"Find a place that's right for you," I said. "When you dream of something for a long time, it doesn't always meet your expectations. I've had a lot of dreams come true that I wish had just stayed a dream."

She told me she had plenty of dreams that she planned to leave that way, but she truly thought Florida was the place for her to go. We played a couple of rounds of golf and took a trip to a water park for an afternoon. When I saw Sara in her bathing suit, I wondered what I was going to do next year when she turned 18.

I would have liked to have stayed a little longer, but I got the impression from her mom that I'd monopolized Sara's time enough for one summer. On the flight home, I realized I was 23 years old; I had a ton of money; but my best friends in the world were a pair of lesbians I'd known for a few months and a 17-year-old kid I saw twice year. I vowed to change that if I could only figure out how.

The LPGA event in Maryland was scheduled a week after the U.S. Open so the turnout was low and consisted mainly of players who hadn't qualified for the Open and needed a paycheck. In fact, despite my off-and-on association with the tour for five years, I knew only a handful of competitors, none of them well.

Jenny, Amelia and Bailey all skipped the event, and Sophie Montoya was nowhere to be seen either. But that didn't necessarily mean she wasn't there, I'd learned. I'd planned to play in the pro-am Wednesday and then stay for the 54-hole tournament. I figured I'd cut out early on every other part of my trip so far, I'd do the same this time.

I was paired in a foursome with two marginal LPGA pros and a doctor from Johns Hopkins. It was an entertaining afternoon on a beautiful course. The doctor was a Baltimore Ravens fan and she kept giving me a hard time because we'd lost to them last season. It didn't seem to matter to her that I was still playing in January while all her favorites were on vacation.

On a whim, I decided to drive back to my old hometown after the round. I'd stopped in there once a few summers ago, but I figured I had some time on my hands, and maybe I could catch up with some people I used to know. Nothing much had changed, but I didn't know if that was good or bad. I drove by my old house and it might have been the only thing that was completely different. The owners had put on an addition and put up new siding. I guess it had been sold by the people who bought it six years before, because I didn't recognize the woman who approached me as I was standing on the sidewalk, staring at the front of the house.

"May I help you?" she asked. She didn't look much older than I was.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I just got caught up in nostalgia for a minute. I grew up in that house. It's been a few years since I've been back here and it looks a lot different than when I left."

I started to walk back to my car when she asked if I'd like to come inside.

"I was telling a friend of mine a few days ago that some dreams are better left unrealized," I said. "I think some memories are better left as memories."

She smiled and waved as I drove off.

The only other place I stopped at in town was what passed for the local hangout when I lived there. It had been a coffee shop during the day, and a pizza joint at night back then. I was having a double mint chocolate chip milkshake when the woman from my old house came in.

"If I didn't know better, I'd think you were stalking me," I told her when she sat down across from me.

She told me she wasn't before, but she might start now.

"I realized who you were after you left," she said. "I knew I'd bought your old house, but I thought you might be the kid of the people I bought it from. I always thought you'd be older than you look."

I told her I felt plenty old enough sometimes.

"My daughter sleeps in your old room," she said. "At least I think it's your old room. She's at her father's this week or I'd ask you to visit her. She thinks it's the coolest thing in the world that you used to live in her house.

"You're the closest thing to a celebrity this town has."

I told her that my old room was next to the driveway.