Chapter 8
Unforced
For six days Allen coached Chris like nothing was wrong, and every session he got a little better and a little further away, and the getting-better was the part that finally broke him.
Because the kid was ready. That was the thing Allen couldn't get around, standing in the shade watching Chris move on the clay eight days out — the bottom was in.
The footwork had gone from arriving to setting up to anticipating.
Chris was staying in rallies now that would've folded him in week one, running down balls, constructing points, winning the ugly twelfth exchange.
He was going to walk onto that show court and he was going to be good, genuinely good, good enough to make a real match of it against whatever amateur the draw gave him, good enough that when he lost — because he'd probably lose, the field was strong — he'd lose the way Allen had lost his best matches, on his feet, having spent everything, with nothing to be ashamed of.
And Emilio's voice kept turning over in Allen's chest, on the fortieth floor, patient and loving and correct: I know exactly what it will do to him to try, in public, and fall short.
The old man was wrong about that. Allen knew it the way he knew a game.
Chris trying and losing on his feet wouldn't confirm the disappointment — it would end it, would be the first loss the kid ever got to own, and owning a loss was the whole point, was the bottom, was everything Allen had spent six weeks building.
Emilio didn't understand his own son. Allen did.
Which was exactly why Allen was the only one who could take it away from him.
***
"You're gonna do it," Yaz said. She'd come to the fence at the end of the Thursday session, two coladas in her hands, and she wasn't handing him one, which was how he knew.
"I've known you sixteen years, Cabrera. I watched you not sleep for a week.
I watched a forty-million-dollar car come get you and bring you back with a face like a funeral.
And now you've got the look you get right before you do something you've decided is smart.
" She set both cups down on the fence post, hard.
"He offered you the academy. Didn't he. To get rid of you. "
"It's not—"
"Don't." Her voice cracked like a serve.
"Don't you it's-not me. I've been building that academy in my head next to you for ten years.
I want it as bad as you do. And I am telling you, to your face, before you do the thing: if you take four million dollars to walk away from that kid and steer him back into the little padded box his father built him, then the academy you build with that money is going to have your worst day poured into the foundation, and you're going to stand in it for thirty years knowing what it cost." She picked her own colada back up.
"You've spent twenty years scared of being the help who gets used and dropped.
And you found the one kid in that whole rich world who actually wanted you, actually showed up in a hurricane, and your big plan is to drop him first so it doesn't hurt as much when the thing you're sure is coming comes.
You're not protecting yourself from his world, Allen.
You're doing his world's job for it. You're gonna use him and drop him so nobody beats you to it.
" She turned to go. At the corner of the fence she stopped, the way she always did, the parting shot.
"I'm not gonna talk you out of it. You're too smart to be talked out of things — that's always been your problem.
But I'm not gonna help you carry it either. You do this, you carry it alone."
She walked back across the street to her window, and Allen stood on his clay with two coladas going cold on the fence post and knew, with the tired clarity that had never once let him fake a third set, that she was right about all of it.
And he did it anyway.
***
Chris knew something was wrong the second he came off the court. Of course he did. The kid read barometric pressure; he'd been reading Allen's weather for six weeks.
"Okay," Chris said, toweling off, wary. "You've had a face for six days and today it's worse. So let's just — what is it. Say it. We put everything on the clay, you and me, that's the whole—"
"You're doing the exhibition," Allen said. "Not the main draw."
The towel stopped.
"You're ready for the draw. I want to be clear about that, because you're gonna think this is about your game and it's not.
Your game's there. But you're gonna do the exhibition — hit some balls, take the photo, let the crowd love you, and then you go home.
You don't play a real match." Allen made his voice flat.
The coach voice. The one that didn't have anybody home behind it.
"It's the right call. You walk onto a show court in front of two thousand people and the whole Miami press and you lose, and that's the story — Salazar kid loses in daddy's tournament — and it follows you, and it confirms every—"
"That's my father talking." Chris's voice had gone very quiet.
"Word for word. That's not you. You told me the whole point was to own it.
Win or lose, on my feet, mine. You put that in me with your own hands.
Six weeks of clay. And now you're standing here in my father's exact sentences telling me to take the padded exhibition and go home.
" He dropped the towel. "He got to you. The car.
The offer. He offered you the academy. Say it. "
Allen didn't say it. He let the silence be the answer, which was crueler than saying it, and he watched it land.
"And you're taking it," Chris said. Not a question anymore.
"You're taking the money and steering me back in the box and calling it protecting me.
That's — Allen." His voice broke, right down the middle, the undefended thing cracking wide.
"You. You're the one person who — I stood in a hurricane.
I proved there was no ghost. I gave you the one thing I've never given anybody, and you're telling me my father was right, that everybody's got a price, even you, especially you, and yours was the academy.
" He laughed, and it was the worst sound Allen had ever heard, small and wrecked and old.
"That's the joke, right? I finally found somebody who wanted me and not what I could give, and it turns out you wanted what I could give too.
You just wanted it from my father instead of from me. "
Say something, Allen thought. Tell him it's not the money. Tell him it's the story, the erasing, the thing that buries him. Tell him you'd rather he hated you and was safe than loved you and got buried. Tell him the truth.
He didn't. Because the truth would give Chris something to fight, and Chris would fight it — the kid had a bottom now, he'd stand in the ugly rally, he'd run the thing down — and Allen couldn't survive Chris fighting for him, because if Chris fought, Allen would fold, and then the story would come and the pro-am would be a scandal and the academy would die in the ground and Chris would be the boy who bought his coach, and every scar on Allen's body would be right, and he'd be on the curb, and this time — this time he'd have earned it.
So he did the cruelest thing he had, which was to make it small.
"You're a Salazar," Allen said. "I'm the guy your family pays to sweat you.
That's the actual score, Chris, and it was always going to be the score, and this—" he gestured, once, flat, at the clay, the apartment two blocks away, the storm, all of it "—this was a good summer.
But it was never going to survive the tournament.
You're twenty-eight and you got a taste of something real for the first time and you attached it to the first person who gave it to you, and that person is a thirty-nine-year-old coach with a knee and a business plan, and in a year you'll see it for what it was.
So take the exhibition. Take the soft landing.
Let me build my kids their thing. And let's not pretend this was ever going to be more than it was. "
The court went silent. Even the traffic seemed to stop. Across the street Yaz had turned away, couldn't watch.
Chris stood in the dust — the dust where he'd learned to slide, where he'd won his first earned set, where he'd bled every morning for six weeks to grow a bottom — and looked at Allen with his whole face broken open and, worse, resigned, like something he'd always known was coming had finally, mercifully, arrived on schedule.
"There it is," Chris said softly. His father's cadence.
His father's certainty. "Right on schedule.
Everybody wants the thing you can give. Nobody wants you.
" He picked up his bag. His hands were steady, which was the worst part, the bottom Allen had put in him holding him up through the exact thing Allen was doing to him.
"You know the sickest part? You did put a bottom in me.
Six weeks ago I'd have crumbled right here.
Now I'm gonna walk off this court on my feet, because you taught me how, because you're the best coach I ever had and the first person I ever loved and you're going to take my father's money to disappear, and I'm still going to stand up while you do it.
So. Thanks for that. Genuinely. That one's mine. You can't take that one back."
He walked to the gate. He didn't slam it. He set it, carefully, the way Allen had taught him to set a crate down, the way you handle a thing you respect even when it's breaking your heart.
"Play the exhibition," he said, not turning around.
"Sure. Whatever you and my dad decided. But I'm not gonna pretend it was nothing, and I'm not gonna let you pretend it either.
It was the realest thing I ever had. And you're gonna stand in your beautiful new academy for thirty years knowing you sold it.
" Then, quieter, wrecked, almost gone: "I really thought you were the one who wouldn't."
He left.
***
Allen stood alone on the clay until the light went orange and then gray, until Yaz closed her window without a word and drove off, until the mosquitoes came up off the wet Har-Tru and he still didn't move.
He had four million dollars coming. He had his academy, his kids' wall, his one thing that couldn't be taken, saved.
He'd protected the program, protected Chris from the story, protected himself from the curb.
He'd done the smart thing, the selfless thing, the builder's-math thing.
He'd made an unforced error. The worst one of his life.
Nobody had made him do it — that was the whole definition, that was what the word meant, a mistake that was entirely, only, permanently your own.
Emilio hadn't beaten him. The story hadn't beaten him.
The world that dropped the help hadn't dropped him.
He'd looked at the one person who'd ever driven into a hurricane to prove he'd stay, and he'd dropped himself first, and called it protecting everyone, and now he was standing alone on a public court in the dark having become, in one afternoon, both of the things he'd spent his whole life afraid of: the rich world that used a man and discarded him, and the father who loved his son so much he took away the one thing the boy earned and called it care.
The pro-am was in eight days.
Allen had gotten everything he'd ever wanted, and he'd never in his life been able to fake a third set, and he stood in the dark on his own clay and finally understood that he'd just lost one on purpose.