Chapter 3
Har-Tru
On day three, Allen made Chris slide until he cried, and that was when he knew he was in trouble.
Not because Chris cried. Everybody cried eventually on the green clay, if you coached them right — the Har-Tru took your legs and your pride and your excuses and ground them all into the same red-green dust, and somewhere in the third hour of learning to slide into a shot instead of running through it, most people hit a wall and either quit or wept.
Allen had seen a lot of both. He'd built half his life around the clay precisely because it couldn't be faked.
Hard court, you could paper over a weak player with a big serve and a good day.
Clay made you construct the point. Clay made you stay in the rally when your lungs were on fire and your legs were gone, made you earn every single ball, made you slide and recover and slide again until your body learned that the point wasn't won by the pretty shot, it was won by the guy who was still standing in the ugly twelfth exchange.
You can't fake a third set, Allen's own first coach used to say, an old Cuban guy on these same courts thirty years ago, and Allen had said it to a thousand kids since. It was the truest thing he knew about tennis and, he suspected, about most other things.
So no. It wasn't the crying.
It was that when Chris Salazar went down in the dust on the third slide, both legs shot, chest heaving, and Allen barked "again" the way he'd barked it at ten thousand kids — the rich kid didn't argue.
Didn't make a joke. Didn't pull the name, didn't check his phone, didn't do a single one of the things Allen had been braced for, had been watching for, because watching for the ghost was the only way he was going to survive coaching a Salazar.
Chris just wiped the dust off his face with a hand that was shaking, and got up, and walked back to the line, and slid again.
And landed it.
And looked over at Allen with dust in his eyebrows and tears cutting clean tracks through the grime on his face and the biggest, most undefended grin Allen had seen on a grown man in years, and said, "Did you see that? Tell me you saw that."
"I saw it."
"Say it was good."
"It was ugly," Allen said. "You slid late and you got there anyway.
That's not the same as good." A beat. He let it sit exactly one second too long, the way you did when you were about to give a kid the thing they'd bled for.
"It's better than good. That's the first ball you've earned since you got here. Now do it forty more times."
Chris laughed, wrecked and delighted, and did it forty more times, and Allen stood in the shade with his arms crossed and a bad feeling in his chest that had nothing to do with the guy's tennis, because you could stay professional with a rich kid who whined.
You could keep all your walls up around a rich kid who whined.
It was the ones who bled for it that got under the fence.
***
The friction came, when it came, from the world and not the kid.
It was the middle of day four and they were running cross-court patterns — Chris finally arriving early on the ball, the footwork clicking into place a half-second at a time, the whole beautiful bought forehand starting to grow a spine underneath it — when a black Escalade eased into the lot and sat there idling, and a guy in a golf shirt that cost more than the fence got out and walked to the gate like he owned the concept of gates.
"Mr. Salazar," the guy called. "Your father's office has been trying to reach you. The Thursday lunch. Ms. Salazar asked me to—"
"I'll be there," Chris called back, and Allen watched something go tight and old across the guy's face, watched the golden-boy grin drop back down over it like a garage door, watched him become, in the space of one sentence, a different person — smoother, emptier, managed.
"Tell Elena I got it. Tell her I'm in the middle of something. "
"She said to remind you it's the—"
"I know what it is." Sharp. Then, catching himself, softening it into charm, the awful practiced charm Allen had watched him hide behind on day one: "It's handled, man. Thank you. Really. I'll be there in the blue and everything."
The Escalade sat there another minute, making its point, and then eased back out of the lot, and when it was gone Chris turned back to the court and his hands weren't steady and his next six balls sailed long, every one of them, the spine gone out of the forehand like someone had pulled a plug.
"Hey," Allen said. "Come back."
"I'm here."
"You're not. You're in a black car halfway to a lunch you don't want to go to.
" Allen fed another ball; Chris netted it.
"That's the thing about clay. It knows where your head is.
You can lie to a hard court, hit through your feelings on a fast surface, no problem.
Clay makes you stay in the rally and there's nowhere to hide in a rally.
So." He caught the next ball in his hand instead of feeding it, held it.
"You want to hit, or you want to go be a Salazar for a minute?
Because you can't do both at once and I'm not gonna waste balls on a guy who's somewhere else. "
And that was where the fight started, and it was a good one.
***
"You don't get to do that," Chris said, and the charm was gone, and what was under it was hot.
"You don't get to see one guy from my dad's office and decide you know the whole thing.
You did the same face they all do — the oh, right, he's one of them face — you've been doing it since day one, watching me like I'm gonna turn back into a rich asshole any second—"
"You are a rich asshole. You're just a rich asshole who can slide now."
"—and I'm out here bleeding on your clay at six in the morning and you still can't—"
"Because I've seen this movie!" Allen didn't raise his voice often; it surprised them both.
"You think you're the first talented guy from a big family I ever watched try to have one real thing?
I coached them for twenty years. And the black car always comes.
Always. Maybe not day four, but it comes, and the lunch always wins, because the lunch is who you are and the court is who you're pretending to be, and one day you'll pick the lunch and I'll be standing here holding a hopper full of balls I wasted on a phase.
" He was breathing hard. He hadn't meant to say all of it.
"So yeah. I watch for the car. That's not me being unfair to you.
That's me protecting the one thing in my life a Salazar can't take. "
The court went quiet. Yaz, across the street, had stopped wiping down her counter.
Chris stood there in the dust with his ruined forehand and his shaking hands, and for a second Allen thought he'd do the rich-guy thing after all, the wounded exit, the I don't have to take this — and Allen even wanted him to, a little, because it would prove the point and let him keep his walls.
Instead Chris walked to the net, and he put both hands on the tape, and he said, quiet, all the heat gone out of him, "You think I want to go to the lunch?"
"I think you'll go."
"I'll go because if I don't, my father calls it another thing I quit.
That's the whole trap, Allen. The lunch isn't who I am.
The lunch is the cost of the court. I have to keep being the disappointment they can manage — showing up in the blue, hitting three balls for the cameras, being charming and saying nothing — because that's the deal that buys me the freedom to come bleed on your clay at dawn where nobody's watching.
The car isn't me choosing them over you.
The car is the tax I pay to be here at all.
" His jaw worked. "You've spent twenty years watching rich kids quit on you.
I've spent twenty-eight years being the rich kid everybody already decided was going to.
You want to know the difference between me and the ones you coached before?
I already know I'm the disappointment. I've been the disappointment on purpose since I was seventeen because it hurt less than trying.
This—" he lifted one shaking hand off the net tape, gestured at the clay, the dust on his legs, the whole brutal beautiful morning "—this is the first time since I was a kid I've tried at something where the trying was mine.
And you're standing there waiting for me to quit like everybody else.
So congratulations. You found the one way to make me feel exactly like my father does. "
Allen didn't say anything.
Because there was nothing to say. Because the kid had reached right past all of Allen's carefully built armor and put his finger on the ugly thing underneath, which was that Allen had been treating Chris like the family that dropped him — had been so busy protecting himself from being discarded that he'd been discarding the kid first, preemptively, every single morning, watching for the ghost so hard he'd never once just watched the guy in front of him bleed.
He's not the family, Allen thought. He's the kid. He's the kid they made into an asset. You, of all people, should have seen that on day one.
Because Allen knew exactly what it felt like to be good at this game and have somebody turn it into something that wasn't yours anymore.
He'd been nineteen and hungry and real, and then he'd been a prospect, a project, a return on investment for an agent and a manufacturer and a string of people who'd loved him exactly as long as his knee held, and the day the knee went at twenty-nine, the day he stopped being a return, they'd forgotten his name at the Christmas party too.
Different Christmas party. Same forgetting.
He'd been so sure the money made them different from him.
He'd never once let himself see that the money had done the same thing to Chris that the losing had done to him.
"Sit down," Allen said.
"I don't want to—"
"Chris. Sit down. We're done hitting for today.
" He crossed to the bench in the shade, the beat-up green one, and after a second Chris followed, and they sat, and Allen looked out at the empty court with the sun climbing and the dust settling, and he said the truest thing he had, because the kid had earned a true thing back.
"I quit, too. Sort of. My body quit for me, which is worse in some ways, better in others — nobody gets to blame you when it's the knee.
But I know the thing you're talking about.
Being good at this, and then some people with money deciding your good is theirs now.
It's a specific kind of lonely. I've been carrying it around so long I forgot it wasn't only rich kids who get it done to them.
" He looked at Chris. "I've been unfair to you.
Watching for the car instead of coaching the guy.
That's on me. It won't fix the whole thing, because I'm still not gonna trust your world, I've got scars there and I've earned them. But I'll stop treating you like it."
Chris was quiet a second. "That's a lot of honest," he said. "You keep doing that. It's very disorienting."
"You said you wanted the honest thing."
"I did. I do. It's just—" Chris scrubbed a hand through his dust-stiff hair.
"Nobody's ever been unfair to me and then said so.
Usually they're just unfair and you're supposed to be grateful for the access.
" He almost smiled. "Okay. New deal. You stop watching for the car, and I'll—" his voice caught, went sideways into something more real "—I'll show you it's not coming.
Every morning it doesn't come, that's me paying you back.
That's the only interest I've got that isn't attached to my dad. "
***
Yaz brought the coladas over herself, which she never did — usually you walked to the window — and Allen understood it for what it was, his best friend inserting herself into a thing she'd decided about, setting two little foam cups down on the bench between them with the specific overcasualness of a woman who had Opinions.
"On the house," Yaz said, to Chris. "Both of you. Cabrera looks like he's had a feeling, it's very rare, I want to encourage it."
"I don't have feelings," Allen said. "I have a knee and a business plan."
"He has feelings," Yaz told Chris. "Deep ones.
He cried at a dog food commercial in April.
I have witnesses." She was already walking back to the window, delighted with herself, calling over her shoulder, "The little cups are yours to keep.
Welcome to the program, rich boy. You're one of us now, God help you. "
Chris looked at the colada like he wasn't sure how it worked.
"You've never had one," Allen said. It wasn't a question.
It was, somehow, the saddest thing he'd learned about the kid all week — that a guy who'd grown up eight minutes from here in a house his Colombian father built had somehow never stood at a walk-up window and had a two-dollar coffee handed to him for free by a woman who called him rich boy and meant it kind.
"There was always—" Chris turned the cup in his fingers.
"There was staff. There was a machine that cost forty thousand dollars.
There was a guy whose whole job was the coffee.
There was never—" he lifted the little foam cup, looked at it "—this.
Somebody just handing you a thing because you bled on their court. "
"Drink it before it gets cold. It's already too sweet, that's the point, don't fight it."
Chris drank it. His face did something Allen would remember — the same thing it had done on the third slide, when he'd landed the ugly ball, the undefended thing, the grin with no strategy in it — and he said, "Oh.
Oh, that's—" and didn't finish, and Allen understood, because there wasn't a word for it, there was just the specific too-sweet scald of the most ordinary luxury in the city, the one thing money had never once bought this kid because money was the exact thing that had walled it off.
They sat on the beat-up green bench in the shade with the empty clay in front of them, drinking coffee out of little foam cups, and Allen did not think about his walls, or the ghost, or the black car, or the twenty years of scars, or the very bad idea it would be to start looking at a Salazar the way he'd caught himself starting to look.
He just sat there in the good gold morning with a guy who'd bled for an ugly ball and tasted his first free colada, and let it be nothing, and knew, with the tired clarity of a man who'd never once in his life been able to fake a third set, that it was already not nothing at all.
"Same time tomorrow," Allen said, when the cups were empty. "Bring the legs. We're doing slides again."
"Can't wait," Chris said, and meant it, and the terrible part was that Allen believed him.