"That's not the point," her father said.
"It's the only point I can see." Her mother ran water in the sink and scrubbed her hands and forearms up to the elbow with the gritty orange soap, the way a surgeon would. "If she can't beat him, she gets laughed at and she can't hit behind your shed anymore. She's been laughed at before. She'll live. If she can beat him, she goes to Columbia." She turned off the tap and looked at Dee over her shoulder. "Can you?"
Dee opened her mouth and shut it again.
The truth was she didn't know. She had played the boys at Washington Street, who hit hard and wild and quit when they lost, and Mrs. Odom, the gym teacher, who'd played at Winthrop, and the backboard ten thousand times. She had never played anybody like Whit Langford.
But she had watched Whit from the maintenance road, through the gaps in the windscreen, the way you'd watch weather coming. He served like the boys on television, like McEnroe nearly, a big looping motion that ended with him already moving forward, and he came in behind it to the net and put the volley away before you'd even found the ball. And the Prince, with its head as big as a skillet, made every ball he touched come off hot.
"I don't know," Dee said.
"Then find out," her mother said, and dried her hands on the dish towel, and sat down, and pulled Dee's butter beans over and ate them herself.
* * *
She found out at Washington Street the next morning that she couldn't return a serve she couldn't see.
She had talked Marcus Odom—Mrs. Odom's nephew, who was seventeen and six foot three and played for the high school when he wasn't working at the Piggly Wiggly—into serving at her. He served as hard as he could, flat, aiming at her body, and the ball skidded off the asphalt and was past her before she'd finished turning. She got her racket on maybe one in four. The ones she got went straight up in the air, or into the chain net, or over the fence into the parking lot of the Baptist church.
"Just hit it by him," Marcus said, sweating through his shirt. "Or lob him."
"I know, Marcus."
She rode home at noon with her shoulder aching and the tape on her grip soaked through and slick. She was pushing the bike up the last bit of hill on Duke Street, too tired to pedal, when she noticed a man sitting on the bench outside the barber shop on the corner. An older man, thin, very dark, with gray in his close-cut hair and a pressed white shirt buttoned to the collar despite the heat. He had a paper sack on his knees and he was eating peanuts out of it, one at a time, and dropping the shells in a neat pile by his shoe.
She knew him. Everybody at the club knew him, in the way you know the furniture. He was Mr. Grant, Isaiah Grant, who ran the men's locker room—handed out the towels, shined the shoes, restrung rackets in the little back room off the pro shop when Coach Pemberton couldn't be bothered. She didn't think she'd ever heard him say more than afternoon.
"Miss Pruitt," he said.