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Ransom’s crouched at their feet, slipping off his white sneakers and tugging on the work shoes his mother brought out to him. “See that, Mom? If I’m the best player in town, I’m better than Mr. Manning and he won the Davis Cup.”
Veronica shakes her head and eyes Parker. “What’ve you done? He gets it in his head he’s that good, and he’ll stop practicing.”
“Nah,” Ransom says, an exact mimic of his mentor’s catch phrase. “I’ll never stop playing.”
“Well,” Veronica says to Parker, “If you won’t let me pay anything, at least think about letting me talk to Glenn and take some responsibility for that whole disaster.”
“Don’t worry about that. It was time for me to part ways with that place anyway. We’ll keep up the schedule here at the high school. What do you think, bud? Tuesday night, say, six?”
Ransom nods and cheers, and then scrambles up to his feet. He gives Parker a bear hug and then accepts his sports bag from his mother and straps it over his shoulder.
I can hear him chatting excitedly as the two make their way back toward the parking lot. “And then we worked on my backhand, the eastern grip that I told you about…”
Before I overthink it, I get up off the metal bench and walk out to Parker. With my hands stuffed in the pockets of my fleece, I study his sneakers, which aren’t that far from my leather boots.
When I finally raise my eyes, I watch the chilled cloud of our breath mingle in the small gap between us. “So, you’re helping that kid. Ransom. Like charity. That’s really sweet.”
“Just don’t let him hear you call it charity. Kid’s too proud for his own good, and so is his mom. They want this kept on the down low. I can’t blame them. No one wants to be pitied.”
“And that’s why you wouldn’t talk about why you were fired. You were respecting their wishes about keeping it quiet. But I get it now. You were breaking into the tennis center to give him lessons for free.”
“He’s going places, Gem. Recruiters will watch him play at the New England Junior Championships next spring, and he’s got a good shot at some full-ride college scholarships. Or, he might go my route, ditch the books, and just have fun.”
I look out at the floodlights that bookend the makeshift backboard. “Yeah, if you can call becoming an Olympic athlete fun. I know that must have been hard work for you.”
Out beyond this lit up area, night has really descended over the field and woods around us. But Parker and I stand in this pool of pale light as though it’s heaven’s spotlight, shining down on only us.
“It’s not work if you love it.” He bounces a ball a few times and then lobs it toward one of the boards. It hits the wall and changes directions. When it comes my way I tug my hands out of my pockets in time to catch it.
“What do you think, wanna play?” Parker asks me.
Play.
I haven’t really played that much in recent years. Somehow I’ve managed to pack all my waking hours with work—despite being up before the sun and going to bed way later than my peers.
I love my work, and it feels fulfilling and important. But it’s stillwork. Mosty administrative and managerial. Lots of it online.
Basically, I’ve been living on my computer for ages. I do ride a stationary bike for exactly 25 minutes every evening, before doing pilates, but that can hardly be calledplaying.
Now, with my laptop back in the truck and this neon-green, slightly scratchy tennis ball in my hands, I wonder if maybe my life’s become a littletooproductive. On a scale with work on one side and fun on the other, I let the balance tip so far over that I almost forget what it even feels like to do something without a goal in mind.
That can’t be healthy.
I lob the ball back at the board. To my satisfaction, it hits it and ricochets toward Parker. “Hey, the plywood works. It’s almost like you knew what you were doing when you set this thing up,” I tease.
“Give me a little credit. I have blueprints for all sorts of things up in my head.”
“Do you, now?”
He chuckles and walks to his duffel bag. “Yeah. I can make a plan with the best of ’em. I had tonight mapped out, and you didn’t even see it coming. But here we are, about to get our game on. You got your running shoes?” He pulls a racket from his bag and walks to me with it extended.
I take it from him, and for some reason, it feels like I’m accepting much more than a tennis racket.
Like his friendship.
“Thanks,” I say. “I won’t read into the fact that you had a woman’s racket handy. That’ll get me thinking about how you probably do this with girls all the time.”
“The fact you just said that means you already thought it,” he says with a grin. “But it’s not true. I’ve seen a couple women, since I’ve been with you. But I never had to work this hard to get a girl to hang out with me. You’ve got me bending over backwards.”
