* * *
She found him in the restringing room the next afternoon. She had to go through the pro shop to get there, past Coach Pemberton at the register, who was on the phone and looked at her like she'd tracked something in on her shoe, and past the wall of photographs, the junior champions going back to 1952, the most recent of them Whit with a trophy shaped like a silver bowl. The back room was narrow and smelled of gut string and machine oil, and there was a stringing machine clamped to a workbench and a little radio playing a Braves game, and Mr. Grant was sitting on a stool with a Head racket in the machine, pulling a string tight with a pair of pliers.
He didn't look surprised.
"Shut the door," he said.
She shut it.
"You said you restrung my racket."
"I did." He tied off a knot and clipped it. "Spring of '76. Lady brought it in. Wilson Evert, brand-new that year, she'd gotten it for her birthday. Wanted it strung at sixty pounds, which was too tight for her, and I told her so, and she said do it anyhow. I did it anyhow. Brought it back to me twice more after that. Last time was '81." He took the Head out of the machine and set it on the bench. "Let me see it."
She handed it over. He held it the way she'd seen people hold a baby that wasn't theirs: carefully, a little away from the body, as if it might do something unexpected. He looked down the frame like a man sighting a rifle. He plucked the strings with his thumb and listened. He touched the knotted places and the crack at the throat.
"You got this at the St. Helena sale," he said.
"How did you know that?"
"Because I saw it go in the box." He set it gently on the bench. "And I thought about buying it back myself. And then I thought, Isaiah, what are you going to do with a lady's racket at your age? And I left it. And then about two months later I see a little white girl hitting with it against that board behind the shed, and I thought, well. There it went."
Dee didn't know what to say to that. She didn't know whose it had been, and something in the way he said lady told her not to ask yet.
"You want to beat that boy," Mr. Grant said.
"Yes, sir."
"Why?"