* * *
He came to Washington Street that Tuesday night.
The public courts had lights, sort of: four poles with sodium lamps that buzzed and drew every bug in the county and made everything the color of weak orange juice. They went off at ten. Dee was out there alone at nine-thirty, serving buckets—Mr. Grant had told her that her serve didn't have to win points, it just had to not lose them, and she was practicing putting her second serve deep to the backhand, over and over, into a Folgers can he'd given her.
She didn't hear the car. She just looked up and he was there, outside the chain-link fence, his fingers hooked in it, a white Le Coq Sportif sweatband on his wrist like he'd come from somewhere and forgotten to take it off.
"You're dropping your toss," he said. "On the second serve. You toss it lower 'cause you're scared, and then you push it."
Dee caught the ball she'd been about to toss.
"You came all the way over here to tell me that?"
"No." He let go of the fence. "I don't know why I came over here."
There was a gate, hanging off one hinge. He came through it and stood at the net post, not on the court, exactly, just at the edge of it. In jeans and a T-shirt, no alligator, he looked like a boy who had driven around for a while with nowhere to go.
"Your dad tapes your matches," she said.
He didn't ask how she knew. "Every one. Since I was ten. He bought the camera special. Big Panasonic, weighs about forty pounds. He sits up on top of the bleachers with it on his shoulder like he's filming the moon landing." He picked at the net tape. "Then we watch them. That's what we do. Some families play cards."
"Does he play?"
Whit laughed, one short breath through his nose. "My dad? He played football at Clemson. He thinks tennis is a game for girls and Europeans." He said it in a voice that wasn't his, a big flat voice, and then said in his own: "He just likes to win. He likes it when I win. When I don't, we watch the tape till I figure out why."
Dee bounced a ball. The bugs ticked against the lamps overhead.