"It was in," he said.
Coach Pemberton leaned down. "Whit, I've got the call."
"It's on the line. I'm standing right here looking at it." Whit put the tip of his Prince down beside the mark, so everybody could see. "It's her point. Fifteen-thirty."
There was a silence on Court One like the silence in church right before the organ starts. Somebody in the bleachers said, "Well, I'll be." The camcorder on top of the bleachers came down off Mr. Langford's shoulder.
"Whitfield," Mr. Langford said.
Whit didn't look up there. He walked back to the baseline and bounced the ball and waited.
"Fifteen-thirty," said Coach Pemberton finally, and wrote it down.
After that the calls were straight, mostly, because every time one was close Whit walked over and looked at the mark himself, and Coach Pemberton gave up, and the bleachers stopped murmuring and started watching. Dee didn't understand it any better than she'd understood the tennis ball on the windowsill. She didn't try to. She just kept putting the ball up in the air.
She broke him for the first time at 3-3. She broke him again at 5-5, on a drop shot she'd hit into the Ebenezer net a hundred times before she ever hit one right: racket back exactly as for a drive, then the soft hand, catching an egg, and the ball barely cleared the tape and died on the clay like something shot, and Whit, three steps behind the baseline, didn't even run for it. He just stood there with his hands on his hips and looked at it.
Then he looked at her. And for the first time all afternoon—maybe for the first time ever—he smiled at her, a small, crooked, unwilling thing, the smile of somebody who has been beaten by a shot fair and square and can't help admiring it.
She served it out at 7-5. On set point she hit her second serve deep to his backhand, tossed high, the way he'd told her, and he hit the return into the net.
"Set, Miss Pruitt," said Coach Pemberton. "One set all."
Along the far fence, the caddies were hollering now. Leon had his white jacket off and was waving it over his head. Her mother had both hands over her mouth. Her father hadn't moved at all, except that he'd taken his hands out of his pockets.
Mr. Grant hadn't moved either. But when she looked at him he put the finger up again, and turned it, slowly, toward the top of the clubhouse roof.