"One more thing," he said.
His father looked at him. Whit didn't look back. He was looking at Dee, and his ears were still red, but his voice was even.
"If I lose," Whit said, "I apologize. Out here. On the veranda. In front of everybody."
"Whit, for God's sake."
"Write it down," Whit said. "She said both sides."
Walking back down the hill in the blue dusk, he didn't say a word until they got to the truck. Then he stood with his hand on the door and looked out at the courts, perfect and empty, the white lines glowing.
"You know what you just did?" he said.
"I know."
"You don't." He opened the door. "That man doesn't make bets he can lose. He's not putting you on that court to see you play. He's putting you on it so they can watch."
"Then I'll give them something to watch," Dee said, and climbed in, and slammed the door harder than she meant to.
* * *
Her mother came home from the packing house in Port Royal a little after nine, smelling the way she always smelled in shrimp season, of brine and ice and the bleach they used on the steel tables. She stood in the kitchen doorway of the little house on Duke Street with her rubber boots in one hand and listened to Dee's father tell it, and when he was done she set the boots down on the newspaper by the door and said, "Well."
"Well what, Carol?"
"Well, can she beat him?"
Her father stared at her. Dee, at the kitchen table with a bowl of cold butter beans she hadn't touched, stared too.