"No," Whit said, still looking at Dee. "If she wants a match, she can have a real one." He pushed his hair off his forehead. "I'll tell my father."
He turned and walked off, and the other two went after him, Trip still laughing, looking back at her over his shoulder like he couldn't believe what he'd seen.
When they were gone Dee stood behind the shed with her racket in both hands and her knees suddenly gone loose. The egret lifted out of the ditch, unhurried, and flapped off low over the marsh.
"Oh, Lord," she said out loud, to nobody. "What did you just do."
* * *
What she'd done, it turned out, went up the hill to the clubhouse faster than a summer storm.
By the time her father came in off the golf course at seven, wiping his hands on a red shop rag, Mr. Dabney the club manager was waiting for him at the door of the maintenance shed with his arms folded. Dee was inside, sitting on an upturned bucket, pretending to oil the reel mower.
"Raymond," Mr. Dabney said. "We need to have a conversation about your daughter."
Her father looked at her. She looked at the mower. She heard him put the rag in his back pocket, slowly, the way he did everything.
"What'd she do?"
"Mr. Langford would like a word with the both of you," Mr. Dabney said. "On the veranda. Now, if you don't mind."
Her father didn't say anything on the walk up. Dee had never been on the veranda. She walked up the wide front steps with clay on her sneakers and felt every head turn.
It was the cocktail hour. Ceiling fans turned slow above wicker chairs. Women in sundresses and men in pastel trousers sat at little round tables with the marsh going gold behind them, and somewhere inside, through the open French doors, a television was replaying McEnroe taking Connors apart in the Wimbledon final, the announcer's voice low and pleased with itself. Mr. Gordon Langford sat at the best table, the one at the corner where the veranda turned and you could see both the eighteenth green and Court One, with a bourbon in front of him and his son beside him.
He was a big man, Mr. Langford, broad in the chest, with a sunburned face and very white teeth and hair that had been the manila color once and was going silver at the sides. Everybody in Beaufort County knew who he was. His company was building Marsh Hen Landing out on Lady's Island, two hundred condominiums on pilings, and there were billboards about it on the Sea Island Parkway with a drawing of a blue heron wearing a little captain's hat. He stood up when they came over. He shook her father's hand.
"Raymond. Good to see you. Sit down, sit down. Can I get you something? Leon, get Raymond a beer."