Epilogue
Third Set
Seven months later, the Cabrera Community Tennis Academy was three public courts, a resurfaced fourth, a shipping container full of donated rackets, a hand-painted sign, and the single best thing Chris Salazar had ever been allowed to be part of, and it had not one dollar of his father's money in it.
"You're arriving," Chris called. "You've gotta set up before the ball gets to you, not after. Split step, then move. Again."
"This is boring," Deandre announced.
"It's incredibly boring. Boring is where the bottom comes from. Again."
Deandre grumbled and reset and hit the next one clean, deep, and looked at Chris with a grin that Chris recognized in his own bones, the grin of a kid who'd just earned something, and Chris felt the whole thing come around full circle so hard he had to look at the sky for a second.
Because that was the thing nobody had told him, the thing he'd never once imagined for himself back when he was the disappointment coasting through his father's photo ops: that the only thing better than finally earning something yourself was standing on a public court at 6 a.m. teaching a nine-year-old how to earn his.
"Say it was good," Deandre demanded.
"It was ugly," Chris said. "You set up late and you got there anyway."
"That's not good!"
"It's better than good, kid. Ask my coach." Chris grinned. "Again."
***
Allen came out of the little office with two cafecitos and handed one across the fence, and Chris took it the way he took it every morning now, the small foam cup, the too-sweet scald, the most ordinary luxury in the city and the only one his father's money had never been able to buy him — because it turned out you couldn't buy it, you could only be handed it, at a walk-up window, by people who'd decided you were one of them.
"He's good," Allen said, watching Deandre. "The kid. He's got the ugly forehand and no bottom and a bad attitude. He's gonna be a nightmare and then he's gonna be great."
"Sounds like somebody I know."
"Sounds like every kid worth coaching." Allen leaned on the fence next to him, shoulder to shoulder, and drank his coffee, and for a minute they didn't say anything, which was still Chris's favorite thing, the not-saying, the comfortable weight of a man who'd stopped keeping the distance seven months ago and never picked it back up.
The story had come, by the way. Exactly like Allen said it would.
SALAZAR HEIR AND PUBLIC-COURT COACH: LOVE MATCH AT FOUNDATION PRO-AM.
There'd been a photo of the fence kiss on the cover of a magazine Chris's father owned a piece of.
For about three weeks it had been the biggest thing in Miami, and some people had said the thing Allen had been terrified they'd say — that the coach climbed, that the kid bought his way to a boyfriend — and then the thing Allen hadn't counted on happened, which was that nobody who actually watched the match believed it, because you couldn't fake a third set in front of two thousand people, and Chris had won his on his own two feet, and the tape didn't lie.
The story that stuck, in the end, wasn't heir buys coach.
It was quitter learns to fight. Which was the true one.
Which was the only one Chris had ever wanted.
"Your dad's coming today," Allen said. "You know that, right? Elena texted. He wants to watch the Saturday program."
"I know." Chris turned the cup in his fingers. "He asked to. Didn't announce it, didn't send anybody, didn't offer to buy anything. He asked. That's—" Chris shook his head. "You have no idea how big that is. My father has never once in his life asked to be somewhere. He arrives. He's asking."
Emilio Salazar arrived — of course he arrived, some things you don't unlearn at seventy — at nine, in slacks that cost more than the shipping container, and he stood at the fence in the Miami heat and watched his son teach a nine-year-old to slide on the clay, and he didn't say anything for a long time.
Chris felt him there, the way you always felt his father, the room rearranging, except the room was a public court in the Grove and it didn't rearrange for anybody, and Chris watched his father slowly understand that, watched him stand at a fence he couldn't reorganize and just be a man watching his son.
"He's a good teacher," Emilio said finally, to Allen, nodding at Chris.
"Better than good. Patient. I didn't know he was patient.
I never gave him anything that required it.
" A pause. The old man's accent, worn smooth, never sanded off.
"I offered you the four million again. Last month.
Through Elena. No conditions this time. I want you to know I meant it clean. "
"I know," Allen said. "And I said no again."
"You did." Emilio almost smiled. "You're going to make my son's life very inconvenient and very hard and much too honest, and you're going to build this thing over ten years with your hands when I could hand it to you in a week, and I've decided—" he watched Deandre land an ugly forehand, watched Chris say something that made the kid laugh "—I've decided that's the point.
That the ten years are the point. It took me until I was seventy and watching my son kiss a coach through a fence to understand a thing you two apparently knew all along, which is that a thing handed to you isn't the same as a thing you earned, even if they look identical from the outside.
Even if it's the same academy. The same forehand.
The same coffee." He looked at the little foam cup in Allen's hand.
"May I have one of those? I haven't had one from a window in forty years. Someone always brings it to me."
Allen looked at him a second. Then he walked to the container, and came back, and handed Emilio Salazar a two-dollar cafecito in a foam cup, and the richest man Chris knew drank it standing at a chain-link fence in the heat and closed his eyes for a second, and Chris watched his father taste the one thing all his money had walled him off from, the same way Chris had tasted it seven months ago, and understood, finally, where he'd gotten it from — the hunger for a real thing, buried under sixty years of receiving.
"Too sweet," Emilio said, and it was not a complaint, it was a benediction.
***
That night, after the courts emptied and the sprinklers came on and Yaz locked the container and the sun went down orange over the Grove, Chris and Allen sat on the beat-up green bench in the dark, the one Allen had hauled over from the old courts, drinking the last two cafecitos of the day, shoulder to shoulder.
"I got a wall now," Allen said. "In the office. Did you see it?"
"I saw it." Chris had seen it that morning — the new one, in the little office, the crooked proud clippings starting to go up.
Kids from the program. A photo of Deandre.
And, in the middle, one clipping Chris hadn't expected, one that made his throat do something: a grainy shot of a terrified luminous man serving for a match on Court 3 at the Salazar pro-am, seven months ago, alone in his box, about to win the first thing he ever earned.
His. On the wall of things that can't be taken.
"You put me on the wall," Chris said.
"You earned it." Allen bumped his shoulder. "Nobody can take it. That's the rule of the wall."
"I love you," Chris said, easy, the way he said it now, the way he'd never once been able to say anything real before a sunburned man dug him up on a public court. "For nothing. For the whole loud impossible nothing of you."
"I know." Allen drank his coffee. In the dark, the guard all the way down, the way it lived now. "You showed up in a hurricane. I'm never gonna get over that. Twenty years I waited for the black car and you drove into a monsoon instead."
"I'll drive into every monsoon. It's my main thing now. I've got a whole reputation."
"You've got a whole nine-year-old who thinks you're a genius, God help him."
"He set up late and got there anyway," Chris said, grinning into the dark. "Kid's got a bottom. I'm gonna make him cry by August."
Allen laughed, low and real, the sound Chris had chased since the first day and got to keep now, every morning, at a fence, at a window, on a bench, on the clay — and they sat there in the warm Miami dark on a beat-up green bench with two foam cups going cold, two men who'd each spent a whole life sure the thing they wanted would get taken the second they reached for it, and who had reached anyway, and earned it, and kept it, the only way anything's ever really kept.
You can't fake a third set.
They'd stopped trying. They were just playing it out, point by earned point, in the dark, together, for as long as it went.
The End