The house sat at the end of Marsh Point Drive with its back to the Coosaw River, white and tall and columned, with a lawn that ran down to a private dock in one long green sweep like a carpet rolled out for somebody important. Dee had never been inside the gate before. She rode in the bed of the truck with the hedge trimmers and the rakes and looked at it the way you look at a ship.
Her father put her on the azaleas along the side of the house, which needed deadheading, and went around back to the irrigation box. She worked her way down the bed, pinching off the brown blossoms and dropping them in a bucket, and somewhere about halfway along she came to a window, low and wide, with the blinds only half drawn, and through it she could see the den.
There was a mounted tarpon over the fireplace and a television the size of a dishwasher, and on the screen was Court One, jumpy and too bright, an orange time stamp ticking in the corner. Whit was on it, serving.
The real Whit was sitting on the sofa. His father was standing in front of the television with a remote control in his hand.
Dee couldn't hear them, not really, just the shape of Mr. Langford's voice coming through the glass, big and flat. She watched him stop the tape. He backed it up. The little Whit on the screen walked backward to the baseline and the ball flew backward up into his hand. Mr. Langford played it forward again. Whit served, came in, missed a volley into the net. Mr. Langford stopped it. He pointed at the screen. He said something. He backed it up again.
Whit just sat there. He had his elbows on his knees and his hands hanging down between them and he was looking at the carpet.
Mr. Langford played the miss four times. The fifth time he turned and said something straight at Whit, and Whit's head came up, and he said something back, short. Mr. Langford took one step toward the sofa. That was all—one step. He didn't raise a hand. But Whit flinched, a small, practiced movement, like a dog that knows where the newspaper is kept, and then went still again.
Mr. Langford looked at him for a long moment. Then he tossed the remote onto the sofa beside him and walked out of the frame, and a door shut somewhere deep in the house.
Whit sat alone in the den with his tennis self frozen on the screen, mid-serve, ball at the top of the toss.
Then he turned his head and looked straight at the window.
Dee dropped down behind the azaleas so fast she scraped her arm on a branch. She crouched in the mulch with a fistful of dead flowers and waited for the back door to bang.
Nothing happened. After a while she heard the television go off.
When she finally stood up and looked, the den was empty, and the blinds were exactly as they'd been, half drawn, and on the windowsill on the inside, where it hadn't been before, somebody had set a tennis ball. A brand-new one, fuzzy and yellow. Just sitting there.
She didn't know what it meant. She finished the azaleas without looking at the window again.