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Parker climbs into the driver’s seat and fires up the truck. The engine rumbles as Parker steers slowly across the lot, then quiets down to a purr as he picks up speed out on a main road. “Ransom here closes up the grocery store on Friday and Saturday nights. Ain’t that right, my man?” Parker lifts his eyes to the rear-view mirror.
From the back seat, Ransom agrees. “I clean the display cases out, mop the floors, count the cash. Wish I had my own wheels. Then I wouldn’t need to bug Mr. Manning for a ride.”
I don’t get it.
Is Parker playing Dad, now? Giving this kid a ride home after work?
I want to rest my forehead on the truck’s fogged windows, just to feel the patch of cool glass on my skin. It’d be a reminder that there’s a whole world out there. A world that doesn’t include me helping my childhood crush earn the title of Dad of the Year.
This single mom Veronica really must be a catch, if Parker’s putting in all this effort.
We travel a few blocks in silence, and then Parker puts his right-hand blinker on… which doesn’t make sense. The only thing over here is the highschool, as far as I can tell.
Parker steers us down a road behind the brick building. In the darkness, I can make out a couple wide swaths of grass: a soccer field and baseball field, I think. At least, there’s an abundance of trimmed lawn, plus a few ragged, rusty looking chain-link fences and I think I see a single stand of bleachers, out there in the darkness.
Parker turns to me. “You’ll get it soon. Don’t worry.”
“Okay… ‘cause I’m not, yet.”
He turns to Ransom. “You cool with it, if Gemma hangs out with us for our session? She’s from out of town and she won’t be a loud mouth about anything.”
“It’s cool,” Ransom says, as he eagerly rummages in his duffel bag. He hauls out a pair of white sneakers and a racket, then pushes open his door and jumps down to the pavement.
Parker turns to me. “Think you could give me a hand and carry a light?”
“What for? What are we doing here?”
Without answering, Parker hops out of the truck, too.
What is going on?I have to push the heavy truck door hard to get the massive thing to close. At the back of the truck, I watch Parker, up in the truck’s bed, wrestle with a stack of long, metal objects that are piled up in a stack. He frees one and hands it down to me. “Two should cut it, I think.”
He untangles another and then jumps down off the bed with it in his right hand. He uses his left hand to grab his duffel bag. “Don’t worry. You can play, too. I brought you a racket. You still use a size two grip?”
It takes me a minute to process what he’s saying. “I’m not going to play tennis tonight.”Why would I?“I haven’t played in years.”
“All the more reason to hit a ball or two.”
“What are these things?” I nod down at the metal bars in my hand. I can make out a silver umbrella-like fixture on the far end.
“Floodlights,” Parker says simply, as if the answer makes all the sense in the world. It’s as if to him, carrying two floodlights and a bunch of tennis gear across a highschool parking lot at nine o’clock on a dark and cold October night makes perfect sense.
“Um, Parker? I don’t even see any tennis courts.”
“That's because the only ones in this town are at Glenn’s center. So, we’re gonna get creative. Hard to see ‘em, but there are basketball courts over there. That way… see?”
I peer into the darkness and make out yet another rusted chain linked fence. Behind it is a sad-looking patch of pavement, a bench, and one lone, rusted basketball hoop. Ransom is back there, too, sitting on the ground hunched over. Trading his work shoes for the white sneakers, by the looks of it.
“I came by earlier today and put two pieces of plywood up against one of the fences,” Parker says. “Painted a line across ’em, net height. We’re going to use them as backboards to train against. This kid is good, Gem.Reallygood. He could be a pro one day, easy. I’m not about to let Glenn’s greed stand in the way of that.”
I haveso manyquestions.
But I can’t ask any of them, because seconds later, Ransom’s shouting about how great the “backboards” are, and Parker’s holding a gate open for me and telling me where to set the floodlight. Soon he’s aimed at two big circles of white light on the pavement and plywood, and he’s jogging across the court, waving for me to follow. “Get out here! There’s space for all three of us, right my man?”
Ransom seems to be in some kind of tennis heaven. He has a big smile on his face, which puts all those crooked teeth on display in the floodlights. “Yeah, come on out, Ms. Lafferty!”
“No, you know what? I’m going to watch from right here.”
“Are you sure?” Parker asks, as he hits a ball toward the wall. It ricochets off, straight to the waiting Ransom, who nimbly shifts his feet and whacks it right back.
