Excerpt from His Favorites by Kate Walbert, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Graphite drivers, she told me, don't grow on trees.

I knew about graphite drivers like I knew about golf carts, like I knew that the keys to the carts were left under the mats for all the men early Saturday mornings. For most of my life, I waked Saturdays to the electric sound of those carts zipping past as the men followed their shots. We were just off the third tee, far enough back that it would take a mulligan to land in our backyard but close enough that it happened from time to time—the rustle of a ball through our huge magnolia, Mother saying oh shit from the back patio, where in good weather she sat reading a novel, her coffee in a thick mug, her pack of cigarettes on the wrought-iron table. Mother an early riser too.

Oh shit, she said, calling me quick to look for the poor man's ball before he considered it lost and zoomed off. One thing my mother hated was a lost ball.

Stephanie was reluctant with this plan, her parents members of the Huntington Club but not members in the way of mine—her parents served on the kinds of committees that considered the long-term health of the various species of trees that grew in what we called the "copse"—the particularly tricky rough bordering the seventh fairway. They diligently explained to the bored other members during monthly meetings the need to increase the dues given the appalling situation regarding the crumbling mortar of the old stone wall that ran the length of Old Stone Wall Road, a situation Mother reported back to me, laughing that Marilyn Farmer then asked with her typical Marilyn Farmer seriousness—wouldn't that make the old stone wall look like a new stone wall? To which Stephanie's father, known as the Colonel, cleared his throat and explained how the stonemasons were known for their ability to replicate the antiquarian ways of the original Italian citizens who arrived from distant shores to Farmingdale to work in the gunpowder mills we could still see dotting the banks of our river, the name of which everyone had difficulty pronouncing and so pronounced in varying ways, ironic, since the word was a Native American word that meant crooked tongue.

"He went on," Mother said. "Endless."

Stephanie's mother we called Barbara the Nurse; she worked in the nurse's office at Farmingdale Elementary and never failed to have licorice or lollipops or Snoopy Band-Aids on hand. That I had over the last year convinced Stephanie to steal their liquor, or to occasionally get high, I considered a personal triumph—as an only child my skills at persuasion honed to such precision that even at fifteen more than one adult advised me to go into law.

But Stephanie was in a mood; she had fought with Barbara the Nurse that afternoon, something about makeup or a forgotten chore—they were those kinds of parents—and given Stephanie's not-quite-right younger brother, Buddy, she had to be the one to do everything perfectly, not just for the Colonel and Barbara the Nurse but for womankind in general. Her mother the kind of woman who tacked up posters of Eleanor Roosevelt and other feel-good early feminists in the Farmingdale Elementary nurse's office; whenever you found yourself there with a fever or a stomachache she would launch into some lecture on female accomplishments, as if feeling lousy at school was a failure of character and she had been hired, in a nursing capacity, to buck you up.

So that day Stephanie arrived at our house pissed, a bottle of gin in her knapsack and a look in her eye. That she had begun to so resemble her mother felt a little unnerving, especially when she pulled out the bottle and smiled.

"Sky rockets in flight," she sang. "Afternoon delight!"

And this is how we got to lip-synching an old Elton John record in my room and the sting of too much time in the sun and somebody's grand idea we should go to the club and check out the caddies, or maybe, and this was me, I know this was me, steal a cart and take a ride, given how the keys were right there for the taking and we were two members out of three. "My parents wouldn't join if you paid them," Carly said, leaning in toward the mirror to apply her eyeliner in what she called an Egyptian scroll before plastering on the blue eye shadow we had found the weekend before in the 99¢ bin at the head shop in the mall. She looked like an exotic bird, or this is how I remember it, and how later that same eyeliner striped her face in black rivulets as if she were behind bars, the blue eye shadow smeared into bruises.

* * *

Dark, or close to dark, one of those late-summer nights when it seems as if the shadows absorb the heat and thicken at dusk, the oppressive humidity of the Eastern Shore, the reminder that beyond all this Farmingdale was boxed in by swamps and ponds and soybean fields left to fallow.

Excerpted from His Favorites by Kate Walbert. Copyright © 2018 by Kate Walbert. Excerpted by permission of Scribner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.