"It's good," Whit Langford said. "It's on the line. Game, set, match."
* * *
For a moment nobody on Court One made a sound.
Then the far fence came apart. The caddies went over it, some of them, and Mr. Dabney shouted something nobody listened to, and the girls from the kitchen were screaming in their hairnets, and Marcus Odom was pounding on the chain-link with both fists, and her mother was running, actually running, in her packing-house sneakers, across the clay. Dee stood on the west baseline with the racket hanging from her hand and didn't move. She couldn't. Her legs had finally decided they were done.
Whit came to the net. He held out his hand. She walked up and took it. His palm was hot and gritty with clay.
"Six-three, five-seven, eight-ten," he said. "I'll be hearing those numbers in my sleep."
"You overruled him," she said. "Why?"
He let go of her hand. He looked past her, at the bleachers, where his father was climbing down with the camcorder hanging off his shoulder by its strap, his face the color of a boiled shrimp.
"Ask me on the veranda," Whit said.
* * *
The veranda at six o'clock on Labor Day Saturday was as full as Dee had ever imagined it, and quieter. The barbecue was still smoking in the striped tent and nobody was eating. The ceiling fans turned. In the bar, the television had gone to a commercial for Delta Air Lines, and somebody reached over and switched it off.
Mr. Langford was at his corner table. He had a fresh bourbon and had not touched it. Mr. Dabney stood at his shoulder with the cream-colored sheet of club stationery in his hand, and around them, at the little round tables, the members sat in their sundresses and their seersucker with their faces carefully arranged.
Dee came up the front steps with her father on one side and her mother on the other, still in the church dress, clay to the knees. Behind them, not on the steps but at the bottom of them, the staff stood in a loose crowd on the lawn. Mr. Grant stood a little apart, as he had all day, in his white jacket.
"Well," Mr. Langford said. He smiled the lit-window smile. "Congratulations, young lady. Hell of a match. Hell of a match. I mean that."