Mr. Grant looked at the court for a long time—the clay he'd watched other people play on for twenty-two years, the lines Raymond Pruitt had nailed down and brushed every morning before the sun came up.
Then he reached into the bucket by the gate, where somebody had left the match balls, and took one out, and walked through the gate onto the clay of Court One in his canvas Converse.
Somebody on the far fence started to clap, and then stopped, as if it were church.
Dee handed him her racket. The Wilson, with its new leather grip and the initials hidden underneath. He held it the way he'd held it on the back steps at Ebenezer, a little away from his body. Then he gave it back.
"No, ma'am," he said. "That one's yours." He turned to the gate. "Whit. You still got one of those cannons in your bag?"
Whit, who had been sitting on the bleachers alone with his bad leg out in front of him, looked up. Then he unzipped his bag and pulled out a Prince Graphite and limped down and handed it over, and Isaiah Grant took it and turned it in his hands and looked down the frame like a man sighting a rifle, and laughed—a real laugh, out loud, the first one Dee had ever heard from him.
"Lord, would you look at this thing," he said. "Althea would've had a fit."
He walked to the east baseline. The last of the sun was coming over the clubhouse roof straight into his eyes, and he didn't so much as squint. He bounced the ball twice.
"Ready, Miss Pruitt?"
"Ready," she said.
He served. It wasn't hard. It was deep and spinning and it kicked up high to her backhand, exactly where she hated it, and she laughed out loud and hit it back, and he hit it back, and they hit until the lights came on along the maintenance road and the egret came over the marsh to see what everybody was doing, and nobody on the fence went home.
* * *
The South Carolina Junior Championships were held at the Columbia tennis center on the third weekend in October, on hard courts that played as fast as glass. Dee lost in the semifinals of the girls' sixteen-and-unders to a girl from Greenville who had a private coach and a two-handed backhand and had never once in her life, she told Dee afterward in the locker room, hit a ball against a plywood wall.
"You should try it," Dee told her. "It never misses."