The Good Kind of Obsession
Meanwhile, I kept working with Jonathan.
I was getting better every day. The passion I brought to the sport probably had something to do with how totally unrelated it was to the mess going on at Wonderland, and the deep uneasiness I felt in my role to secretly spy on a man I’d loved all my life.
What happened on the tennis court took me away from all that.
That was the thing I loved best, probably.
When you were trying to hit a ball, you couldn’t think about anything else.
With a racquet in my hand, my mind was like a stretch of open water on a windless day—no waves, no boats even, no swimmers. It was all about me and the ball.
I believed him when he told me I was a natural.
I felt it. When I thought back to those times when I used to sit on the edge of the court, watching Olivia drag herself lackadaisically through her lesson, chewing her gum, taking ten-minute Coke breaks and giggling every time the ball went into the net—I had to smile.
She had missed out on so much. She just didn’t get the beauty of the game. I almost felt sorry for her.
It was right around this point in the summer—just at the moment when Regina laid out my new job, performing detective work—that Jonathan laid out his own plan for me.
“I want you to play in the Junior Girls’ Tournament at the club, Labor Day weekend,” he told me. “I wouldn’t have believed a player so new to the game would be ready, but you are. There’s no way to move forward without challenging yourself in a real match.”
I’d never played in a competitive match. Then again, I’d never performed surveillance on the father of the children I was babysitting, on behalf of their mother. I felt equally unprepared for both assignments.
“You’re ready for this,” Jonathan told me. “You may be a little rough around the edges, but if you bring your best game, you can beat any one of those girls. The way you serve, it’s like you put everything that ever happened to you into that swing. You’ve got the best junior serve in the club.”
“Those girls have been playing for years,” I told him.
“That’s true,” he said. “But they’re just country club girls. They don’t have your hunger.”
I could have told him no. If I’d said that, he would not have made me play in the tournament.
But I wanted to play. More than that, I wanted to win.
I made a calendar on the back of one of Regina’s notes to me and circled the date. My first tennis tournament. My last weekend at Wonderland.