"Same time tomorrow," he said.
"Mr. Grant. Why are you doing this?"
He pulled the tent stakes up and wound the string around his hand.
"Twenty-two years," he said, "I have handed those men towels. I've shined their shoes and restrung their rackets and listened to them talk about their backhands like they were talking about their children." He tucked the string in the bucket. "Not one time have I set foot on a court at that club with a racket in my hand. Not one time. Not to hit. Not to show a boy where his elbow goes." He picked up the bucket. "I'm sixty years old, Miss Pruitt. I'm not going to get on that court. But I'd like to send somebody out there who knows what I know."
He walked up the beach toward the parking lot. Dee stood there with the water around her ankles and watched him go, and then she picked up her racket and followed.
* * *
They went to the beach every morning for two weeks. Then, when the tide tables turned wrong, Mr. Grant drove her out to St. Helena in his '71 Buick Electra, past the Penn Center and the old praise house and the shrimp docks, down a sand road between fields of tomatoes, to a church called Ebenezer A.M.E. that had a tennis court behind it.
It wasn't much of a court. Somebody had poured the slab in the fifties and nobody had touched it since. Grass grew through the cracks, and the net was patched with fishing line.
"I learned on this court," Mr. Grant said, getting out of the car. "My daddy and three deacons poured it in 1949, so the church boys would have something to do on Saturday besides get in trouble. Pastor Simmons still lets me use it." He bent and pulled a weed out of the service box. "Grass makes the ball do funny things. That's all right. Teaches you to watch it all the way in."
Here he taught her the slice.
He taught it with a paper cup. He set an empty Dixie cup upside down on the baseline in the backhand corner and had her hit at it, over and over, with the racket face open, coming under the ball like she was skimming cream off milk. The ball came off her strings low and spinning backward and skidded when it hit, and stayed down.
"That's your approach shot," he said. "That's your answer when he gets you on the run. Low and short to the forehand, so he's got to dig it up. He's six foot. He hates bending."
He taught her the drop shot, which she had never once in her life hit on purpose. He taught her to disguise it, to take the racket back exactly the same as for a drive and then, at the last instant, soften her hand like she was catching an egg. She hit a hundred of them into the net before she hit one that died where it was supposed to, two feet over, and when she did he said, "Mm," which she would learn was the most he ever said.
"He's going to win a lot of points at the net," Mr. Grant said. "You let him. You're not trying to win every point. You're trying to win the last one."
And every morning, before they did anything else, he made her hit lobs. Lob after lob after lob, high enough that she could count one Mississippi, two Mississippi before they came down, and deep enough that they landed in a rectangle he'd chalked on the cement a foot inside the baseline. When she could put eight in ten in the box, he moved the box back. When she could put eight in ten there, he moved her to the east end of the court, so the morning sun came over the tomato field straight into her eyes, and made her hit them from there.