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  Being alone in the club’s indoor tennis courts and listening to the hollow, vaguely metallic sound of the ball striking the concrete surface was as soothing as a regular beat of a drum. This was how Kevin started each working day, going over his schedule as he served to emptiness. Balls bounced and struck the canvas fence with a dull thud and rolled to a stop. He thought of the various personalities he’d have to slip into for today. Saturdays were jam-packed, with four one-hour individual sessions taking him to lunch, then the junior camp group from two to six.

  Robert Weathers III would be his first, a silver-haired fifty-five-year-old CEO of a small but lucrative drug firm. Robert was a steady client of Kevin’s, in here three times a week, and teaching and playing with people like him was what made Kevin feel more like a whore than a tennis instructor. From the first time they met, Robert made his terms clear.

  “Kevin,” he’d told him, “I’m going to win every time. Do you understand?”

  “Sure,” Kevin said. After doing this for almost a decade, nothing surprised him. At least Bob the Third was comfortable enough with himself to say what he wanted. Last year, there was a guy who was so angry at losing that he threw his racquet at Kevin, launched at his head like a warhead.

  “I’m glad we can do business,” Bob the Third said, offering his hand. Kevin took it, feeling the practiced solid squeeze of a veteran handshaker. “I think of this as a positive warm-up to my day.”

  “Everyone comes here for a different reason,” Kevin said. “I’m here to give you the workout you want, Mr. Weathers.”

  “Call me Robert. And it won’t be too terrible, Kevin. You won’t have to hold back much, because I’m a very capable player.”

  This turned out to be the truth. Robert had a pinpoint forehand and a terrific slice backhand, so all Kevin had to do was not run as hard and flub a return here and there, which actually made him feel worse. A part of him wished it wasn’t so easy to play this limp role.

  After Robert came Hillary Rosenbaum, a dentist’s wife who cared more about her tennis outfits than the game itself. She was a horrendous player, barely able to hit the ball back to him, but she didn’t care. She was there so she could tell her friends at Sunday brunch that she was taking lessons with a pro.

  His third, Roy McDougall, was a twelve-year-old blimp of a kid. His mother came with him and stayed for the duration, badgering her son from the bench. After their first lesson, Kevin had suggested that she perhaps take advantage of the numerous facilities of the club—swimming, aerobics, yoga, anything. She shook her head tightly and quickly, as if she were trying to get bugs out of her hair.

  “You see how fat my son is?”

  “Well, he’s kinda big for his age, but what does—”

  “If I’m not here to push him, you think he’ll do better?”

  Kevin wasn’t about to disagree with this woman, but that was exactly what he’d thought.

  “Okay,” she said, smiling like a slasher-flick villain right before she disemboweled her victim. “Next time, he’s all yours.”

  She disappeared after dropping Roy off for their second lesson. Without his mother, the boy moved like molasses under water. He was a turtle on downers, no matter how much Kevin pushed or even yelled. Unless the balls were hit directly to him, Roy would just let them go by, not even bothering to stretch for the ones that came close. When his mother came back and stayed for the third lesson, Kevin said nothing.

  Ball hopper in hand, Kevin walked over to the other side of the court to pick up the sea of yellow balls he’d been serving for the last half hour. His final personal lesson of the day was with Alexa. With her there was no acting, just tennis, though lately it seemed as if her interest in the sport was waning. She’d just started her third year of high school, and instead of asking Kevin about softening her drop shot or putting extra spin on her twist serve as she used to, the topic of conversation between games had turned toward the stupidity of the boys she was dating.

  Still, he would take twenty Alexas over his other clients any day. It took her a year, but she now possessed a devastating single-handed backhand that she whipped out like a rapier from its sheath. Contained inside those economic series of muscular movements were tens of thousands of their exchanges on this court, hours of hard work compressed into one perfect swing. Whenever he saw her use it, his chest filled up with a warmth that spread like a shot of whiskey, his pride so strong it almost hurt.

  “Hey, Kev!”

  Kevin waved to Bill Flanagan, who jogged around the curtained fence and slipped through the flap in the middle of the court.

  “You’re here kinda early,” Bill said.

  “You too.”

  Bill was the club’s other head tennis instructor and Kevin’s closest friend. They’d known each other since high school, which made it something like twenty-five years. They had gone to the same college on the same scholarship, made the same amount of money, and had both messed up their respective marriages.

  Bill, in his yellow and blue jumpsuit, chugged his morning bottle of coconut water. “So how did it go at the doctor’s? When are they gonna yank out your kidney?”

  He hadn’t meant to lie, but that’s what came out. “It’s being discussed,” Kevin said. “No definite dates yet.”

  They had always been equals, and maybe that’s why Kevin didn’t tell him the truth, not wanting to be the lesser one. He would come clean later, when he knew more about the situation, when he was ready.

  “Hey, how about we do breakfast? I’ll buy,” Kevin said.

  “I gotta get to the court for Janice.”

  “First-name basis with the mayor of Clinton.”

  “Let’s hope she can make my parking tickets disappear.”

  Bill finished his bottle and looped it high over Kevin’s head at the trash can as if he were shooting a basketball, the bottle rotating on its axis so precisely that it looked as if it wasn’t spinning at all. Like Kevin, Bill was also an excellent athlete, and as Kevin watched the empty plastic container swish into the mouth of the metal can, he wondered if they should both be more appreciative of their innate gifts.

  Robert showed up promptly at eight, as he always did. He was wearing his usual uniform of a white golf shirt and brightly colored shorts, turquoise blue today. His backhand was erratic, so Kevin stayed mostly to his forehand. For the last ten minutes, he worked on Robert’s net game, feeding shots to him from the baseline. The CEO of Weathers Pharmaceuticals happily punched ball after ball onto the blue concrete, making satisfactory grunts following each batted shot. His impeccable silver hair never moved as he pivoted quickly to cover the court, and Kevin watched Robert’s face as it made its motions: eyebrows furrowed with anticipation, mouth set firm as he reached with his racquet, gleaming white teeth flashing when the ball caught the line. This was probably what he looked like in the boardroom, too, as he figured out ways to push that new drug out quicker, to put away his competition, to win his corporate game.

  Time went quickly, even with Hillary Rosenbaum, who unfortunately decided to go Serena Williams on him with a skin-tight hot pink tube-and-shorts combo that made Kevin wish for temporary blindness. Hillary wasn’t overweight, but unless you had the physique of a world-class athlete or a supermodel, wearing something as revealing as this was the wrong way to go. Every time she crouched or leaned, fat gathered in satiny pink rolls.

  “How do I look?” she asked.

  “Maria Sharapova,” Kevin said, “eat your heart out.”

  But once they got playing, it wasn’t too bad, mostly because Kevin suggested that they practice topspin baseline shots, which kept her as far away from him as possible. At the end of their session, he asked her if she felt comfortable in her suit.

  “Just perfect,” she said as she yanked down on her shorts for maybe the hundredth time, to keep them from riding up the crack of her ass.

  Hearing her reply, he thought of Alice, who always wore white cotton panties with little printed flowers except on their la
st anniversary, when she wore a black silky thong small enough to be an eye patch. She’d also tortured herself with a pair of four-inch heels, not so much walking but tottering to their restaurant, clutching onto his arm for balance. Once they were seated, she squirmed every so often to keep the string of her exotic underwear from digging into her delicate parts.

  “Comfy?”

  “Oh yeah,” she’d said. “Just like the little tag said, All you feel is naked.”

  “Maybe you should’ve tried it on for a while, you know, before doing it for real.”

  Is that what he’d actually said? Did he not even thank her for her self-inflicted agony? Probably not, but it wasn’t fair for him to take on all the blame. That was near the end, when nothing went right. No matter what he or Alice tried to do to make their relationship work, it turned into an argument. Goodness, those fights, they’d go on all night, the two of them lying in bed like two dry boards, waiting for something to save them, waiting for the words that neither of them were capable of uttering.

  After Roy finished his lesson, Kevin called his father. He was usually up by ten in the morning, so he’d waited until eleven to be on the safe side.

  Soo answered the phone on the first ring. “He sleeping.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “Very tired. Hospital yesterday and very tired.”

  “I’ll come by tonight,” Kevin said.

  “Dinner?”

  He didn’t want to, but it was already too late. Soo spoke rapidly with the giddiness of a teenager. “Daddy sick, I cook no salt, no pepper, boring. For you I cook! Eat very small lunch!”

  He told her he wouldn’t eat lunch at all, which was a joke, but she didn’t get it. Soo wasn’t exactly famous for her smarts, but she was a sweetheart, and Kevin was glad his father had company after his mother’s passing. It was true his father and Soo had gotten close during his mother’s sickness, but Kevin had learned to forgive. Their relationship was an unfortunate by-product of a husband and his wife’s best friend taking care of a woman they both loved, their shared grief turning into something more. Kevin’s sister, on the other hand, would always consider it another mark against their father, a weakness he’d given into. Judy’s stubbornness was as strong and immovable as their father’s, the two of them connected by blood, while Kevin stood on the outer edge of that sanguine circle.

  “Kevin?”

  He was sitting on the bench where Mrs. McDougall continually taunted her fat boy Roy, and when he looked up, he saw Alexa standing before him, her legs bronzed and her ponytail blond from the sun, her racquet resting on one shoulder, her smile curious.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Didn’t you hear me walk in?”

  “Guess not.”

  She sat down next to him and bounced her racquet face lightly against her knees. Her peachy perfume was as light as summer. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  The hurt of her expression was unmistakable. “You don’t want to tell me?”

  “No, it’s not that, it’s just . . .” He didn’t know what to say. Silence divided them like a stranger squeezing into the middle seat.

  Alexa looked down at her feet. She wore size 6 ½, sneakers he’d helped her pick out at the pro shop. “We’re friends, aren’t we, Kevin?”

  As he heard her serious words and saw concern in her little face, the real reason he didn’t want to tell Bill became as obvious as the calluses on his hands, and it worried him. Like an actor who wanted to keep his material fresh, he wanted his first and most emotional performance to be in front of Alexa.

  When he was done recounting his story, she said nothing, just stared at him.

  “That’s so fucked up,” she finally said; then anger flared into her voice. “But I mean it’s so like parents to do something so stupid, isn’t it?”

  He agreed with her in mind but not in his heart. He wished he were sixteen again, because news like this deserved the unbridled, irrational rage of adolescence.

  “All right,” Kevin said, getting up. “Let’s smash some balls.”

  Kevin cranked his forehands down both lines; Alexa returned his shots with bullets of her own. Her crosscourt backhands from the corners were lethal, but Kevin was ready for them, mixing up his returns with heavy topspins and off-speed slices. After half an hour, they were both completely out of breath and laughing. Near the end of their session, they were at the net, trading volleys with robotic rapidity until Alexa nailed him in the stomach. Kevin acted as if it were a gunshot, holding on to his stomach and falling to the surface of the court and lying flat on his back.

  “You got me,” he said, and he closed his eyes, loving every pump of his beating heart. He felt so completely real—and then a set of lips pressed onto his own, and he didn’t care that they weren’t a woman’s but a girl’s. Eyes still closed, he felt her lie on top of him, her body hard and soft, foreign in ways that were both thrilling and intimidating.

  It seemed as if neither of them broke the kiss. It ceased on its own, a creature coming to the end of its natural lifespan. He opened his eyes and found her brown ones staring into his. Sweat dripped down from her nose and chin like tears, and Kevin turned away.

  “Look at me,” she said, and when he didn’t, she said it again.

  “I can’t,” he said, eyed clenched shut.

  “If you don’t, I’m going to cry.”

  So he looked. Her face was so young, her cheeks rosy and porcelain, her nostrils quivering. He felt like a monster, but then she smiled so genuinely that he momentarily forgot his shame.

  Then she leaped up and retrieved her tennis bag and walked to the back door of the court.

  “See you tomorrow,” she said, but there was uncertainty in her voice.

  He sat up. “Okay.”

  Kevin knew he should get going. His juniors were minutes away from invading four courts, but instead, his fingertips found their way to his lips. He traced the surface of the delicate skin, tried to feel his way to some sort of understanding—and failed. He remembered his first girlfriend, a shy redhead, Shirley, seventh grade. She was the first girl he’d kissed, at a pool party. She’d tasted like chlorinated water. He supposed he did, too. Before Kevin could fall any deeper into reverie, his kids arrived, racquets in hand, stomping toward him like an invading army.

  5

  By four o’clock, Judy could hardly move. She’d spent the whole day cleaning up her apartment, even dusting the top of the painting that hung on the living room wall, the one that depicted the back of a girl’s head as she looked out through the half-open window and into the yard. It was her first effort using egg tempera, the view from her old bedroom, and it wasn’t bad, especially the perspective and the use of shadows. At one point, Judy had thought it would be her calling, to be a painter of portraits and landscapes and whatever else. To the right of the painting was the door to her closet, and behind that door, languishing in darkness, was an easel, a palette, and half-squeezed tubes of paint in a wooden rack. All she had to do was get them out, set herself up, and start again. Maybe this weekend she’d do it. Probably not.

  The last time the living room looked this nice was probably the week after she and Brian had moved in, three years ago. The last item she’d unwrapped from the last box was the white ceramic vase that had been handed down to her from three generations of her mother’s side of the family. When Judy tried to give it back, her mother knew exactly what her daughter had been thinking.

  “You won’t break it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because this has been through two world wars and it’ll certainly outlast you.”

  It was the best housewarming gift she received. She bought a round wooden stand that fit the bottom lip of the vase, and it was Brian’s idea to display the ensemble at the top of the entertainment center so they’d always see it whenever they turned on the television. How infinite and generous her life seemed then, to watch her husband delicately set down the vase.
It was the beginning of their future together, and she felt as solid as a tank, her happiness indestructible.

  The vase was plain and pedestrian, a foot high with a slender flaring neck and a thick globular bottom, something you could probably find at a discount store for twenty bucks. But this particular vase went back a hundred years to a little rustic village in Korea, where it had first sat in the corner of her great-grandmother’s room. Later, when Judy’s mother went into hospice care, the vase was one of the objects she’d requested, so it was placed on her nightstand, where it would be the last thing she saw before going to sleep and the first thing she saw when she awoke.

  “Her husband,” her mother had said, “that’s your great-grandfather Min Ho, he would place a new sunflower in that vase every morning for his wife.”

  “That’s great,” Judy said. She didn’t know what else to say to this woman, who no longer resembled her mother but a translucent, skeletal representation of her.

  “Like you, Min Ho was a painter, so in wintertime, he painted her a new sunflower every day, every single day.”

  A month before her death, her mother had told her all sorts of strange stories like this, and Judy couldn’t decide whether they were true or spurious effects of heavy painkillers, but in the end it didn’t matter. Later she would wish she’d either copied the words down in a notebook or, better yet, recorded them on tape, but she ended up doing neither of those things. When it became inevitable that her mother was actually going to die, the last thing Judy wanted to do was have hard evidence of those days and nights. It was really something to see a person go this way, to watch her life force slowly ebb away, like the gradual dimming of a light bulb until it blinked out altogether. It made you want to take a knife to a beautiful flower and lop its head off, shove it into a garbage disposal and obliterate its existence.