Page 140 of Summer After Summer

I meet Wes again at a low moment.

It’s the end of my tennis career. No one’s saying it, but my ranking is speaking for me. I’m down in the dumps, lower even than when I started, and I can’t figure out what’s wrong. I’m thirty—an age that’s unusual in professional women’s tennis for a reason. I work just as hard and my body responds almost as well, but there’s something holding me back. I’m not a killer on the court anymore. I don’t care as much if someone beats me—not like I used to—and it was the fear of losing that kept me in the game. It’s a word that hovers around me, retirement, and I don’t know what to do about it.

How do you give up on the thing you did for years and years to the sacrifice of everything else? How do you take that leap into the unknown?

I haven’t figured it out yet, so I stick to my routine. I eat my boring meals and travel to the next tournament and the next. I see my friends once in a while, Ash becoming more of a memory than a real presence in my life, though here I am in New York City in March, going to a charity event that she insisted I go to for moral support.

She’s six months pregnant with her first kid, and she’s a bit lost, too. She’s always been a party girl, and here she is, unable to drink, bigger than she’s ever been in her life, about to disappear into motherhood. Or that’s what she keeps saying.

“Why are you making me come to this thing?” I ask her in the cab as we weave down Broadway, the cabbie pressing on his brake once a block in a way that makes me feel like we’re on a boat, stopping and starting like we’re crashing into waves.

“Because you need to find a man.”

“What?”

“You do. Enough of this single life.”

“I can’t believe you’re saying this to me. Of all people.”

She pokes her tongue out at me. Her hair is up in a topknot, and she’s wearing thick lashes and a bright red lip. Her fuller face suits her, but I can’t tell her that because she keeps referring to herself as “fat.”

“I know, I know. Sometimes I look at myself in the mirror and I can’t believe it’s me.”

“But you’re happy?”

“I am.”

“With Dave.”

She swats me. “Stop it. I know, okay? I know.”

Their wedding was a lavish affair at the club last summer. I’d worn a pink bridesmaid’s dress and endured being asked when it was going to be “my turn” by every single person I talked to. She’d sent the bouquet in my direction, and I’d thought about ducking it, but instead I caught it easily because my reflexes are like that.

“I’m happy for you.”

“I want you to be happy.”

“I am.”

Ash puts her arm around my neck. “Um, no, you are not.”

“Who says?”

“I say. Ever since London—”

I hold up a hand. “No. No. We are not talking about that ever, remember?”

She pouts. “You should, you know.”

“What?”

“Talk about it.”

I can’t. I can’t talk about it. Not about how the tabloids went into an insane frenzy like I’d killed a child with my car. Or how I was followed around for the next six months and called a whore. I got booed at, at my next tournament, and when I was injured and had to miss the US Open, I was glad.

“You still haven’t talked to him?”

“No. But it was years ago, Ash. It doesn’t matter.”

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