She thought about the members, and Trip Calloway saying the help, and her father on the veranda standing very still in the weather. All of it was true, and none of it was quite it.
"Because he dared me," she said finally. "And I said I would."
Mr. Grant nodded slowly, like she'd given an answer to a question on a test, and he was deciding how much partial credit it got.
"All right," he said. "Then we start Monday. Five-thirty in the morning, before your daddy needs you on the courts. Not here."
"Where?"
"Hunting Island. The north beach, by the lighthouse. Wear shoes you don't mind getting wet."
"We're going to play tennis on the beach?"
"We're going to learn to move on something that moves," he said, and took the next racket off the pile, and put it in the machine, and that was the end of the conversation.
* * *
The tide was going out when she got there, and the beach below the lighthouse was a mile of flat wet sand, hard as a floor near the water and soft as flour up by the dunes. The sun wasn't up yet. The sky over the ocean was the color of the inside of a shell.
Mr. Grant had brought a bucket of old balls, gone bald and gray, and a ball of string, and four tent stakes, and a racket of his own: a wooden Dunlop Maxply, the kind Rod Laver had used, black and gold, with a grip worn so thin at the butt that she could see the shape of a hand in it. He wore canvas Converse and his trousers rolled to the knee. He was wearing an old gray T-shirt, and printed on the front, faded nearly to nothing, were the letters A.T.A. and under them, smaller, NATIONALS 1953.
He staked out a rectangle in the hard sand with the string. Then he walked off another, beyond an invisible net, and stood in it.
"What's A.T.A.?" Dee said.
"American Tennis Association." He bounced a ball on the Maxply's strings without looking at it. "Colored tennis. Back when the other kind wouldn't have us." Tock. Tock. Tock. "Althea Gibson came out of the A.T.A. You know Althea Gibson?"
"She won Wimbledon."