She played with the Wilson. She had a new racket in her bag, too—a graphite Wilson Pro Staff, black and shiny and expensive, paid for out of an envelope Mr. Dabney had handed her father without a word—and she used it for practice, and she was going to have to switch to it someday, everybody said so, wood was finished. But not yet.
Mr. Grant drove her and her parents up in the Buick and sat in the stands every match in his white shirt buttoned to the collar, and by the semifinal he had said "Mm" twice, which was a record.
On the Saturday of the semifinal, about halfway through the first set, Dee looked up into the bleachers and saw Whit.
He was sitting on the top row by himself. He didn't have a camera. He had driven the Jeep up from Beaufort, it turned out, two and a half hours, without telling anybody, and he sat through the whole match with his elbows on his knees, and when she lost he came down to the fence and leaned on it.
"You dropped your toss," he said. "On the second serve. Third set."
"I know."
"Toss it higher."
"I know, Whit."
He grinned. Then he took an envelope out of his back pocket and held it through the chain-link. It was addressed in a small round hand, blue ballpoint, to Miss Delia Pruitt, c/o the Coosaw Point Club, Beaufort, S.C., with an Atlanta postmark.
"I wrote her," he said. "First time in two years. I told her about the match. About the racket." He shrugged, looking away, at the courts, at anything. "She wrote me back. And she wrote you. I didn't open it."
Dee took the envelope. She didn't open it yet, either. She held it against the strings of the old Wilson, against the place where the varnish was worn down to bare wood from all the thousands of long rallies somebody had played before her, and all the thousands she had played since.
"She's coming down in November," Whit said. "To see me. I asked her if she'd hit with us. Out at that church court of Mr. Grant's, if he'll let us." He shoved his hands in his pockets. "She said she would. She said she'd want to see that lob."
"It's a good lob," Dee said.
"It's the best lob I ever saw in my life," said Whit Langford, and behind them, in the stands, Isaiah Grant said, "Mm," for the third time that day.