Chapter 25

y the time Lola and Sara got back from their walk on the beach, Annie had abandoned her shady cabana for the sun. She lay now on a garish beach towel with her floppy hat covering her face and her pink toes pointed at the sky Mel lay beside her on her stomach, her chin nestled on one hand while the other held Janet Evanovich’s newest novel. She was a big fan, and her work was often compared to Evanovich’s, although Flynn Mendez didn’t come close to generating the sales Stephanie Plum generated. Oh well, she reminded herself. Rome wasn’t built in a day. It takes time to build a readership.

Sara unrolled her beach towel and lay down on the other side of Mel. “Is anyone besides me hungry?” she asked.

“I could eat,” Mel said.

“We could go up to the house and make some sandwiches,” Lola said, unrolling her towel on the other side of Annie. She sat down, leaning back on her arms and staring pensively at the sea.

“That sounds good,” Mel said lazily, sinking her chin on her fist. “That sounds like a plan.”

No one moved. The heat was like a drug, soaking through their skin and filling their limbs with a strange lethargy. The steady pounding of the surf was as deep and constant as a heartbeat. After a while Mel dropped her book and dozed, her chin still resting on her fist. Beneath her floppy hat, Annie snored softly.

“I love the ocean,” Lola said in a small voice to no one in particular. Behind her an airplane trailed across the blue sky. “I always wanted to live on the ocean.”

Mel awoke with a start. She rolled over on her back and flung one arm over her eyes. “Why don’t you?” she said in a sleepy voice.

“Yes, Lola, why don’t you live here?” Sara sat up and pulled her knees to her chest. She dug her toes in the warm sand until the tops of her feet were covered. “Now that Henry’s grown, why don’t you just move here?”

Lola stared wistfully at the sea. “Briggs wouldn’t like it,” she said.

“Oh, him,” Mel said flatly, from beneath her arm.

Annie’s snores grew louder and Mel groaned and rolled over on her side. She leaned on one elbow and supported her head with her hand. With the other hand, she sifted sand onto the brim of Annie’s hat. Annie awoke with a snort and sat up. She took the hat off and began to beat Mel with it.

“Why doesn’t Briggs want to live here?” Sara asked Lola. “It’s not like he has a nine-to-five office job he has to stay in Birmingham for. You all could live anywhere you wanted to live.”

Lola cupped her hands like shovels and buried her feet up to the ankles. “He likes the golf course in Birmingham,” she said. “It’s one of his favorite courses.”

“Let him stay in Birmingham and you move here,” Mel said.

Lola laughed nervously and shook her head. “It’s complicated,” she said.

“It always is.” Mel got up on her knees and leaned over to brush the sand out of her hair. “You snore like an outboard motor,” she said to Annie. “How does Mitchell stand it?”

“You should hear him” Annie said, putting her hat back on her head. She pressed her left thigh with her thumb to check for sunburn and then rolled over onto her stomach. “Besides, you should talk,” she said, glancing up at Mel. “You whistle in your sleep.”

“Sleep?” Mel said. “What’s that? I don’t sleep anymore. Who can sleep with all that racket going on out in the crofter?”

“You’re the only one who seems to hear it.”

“Well, tonight I’ll wake you up. They usually get started around midnight.”

“I could make some sandwiches and bring them back down to the beach,” Lola said, her cheeks pink with the sun. “If y’all don’t want to come up to the house.”

“No, Lola, don’t do that,” Sara said. “We’ll all go up in a few minutes.”

“I’ll make lunch,” Annie said, without moving. “I’m used to it.”

“What, can’t Mitchell make his own sandwich?”

“No. Not without making a big mess anyway. Besides, that’s my job.”

Mel lay down on her stomach again, propping herself on her elbows. She stared steadily at Annie, her eyes unreadable behind the dark sunglasses. “What do you mean, it’s your job?”

“I mean, I take care of inside the house and Mitchell takes care of outside.”

“So you break up your chores along gender lines?”

“That’s right.”

“How very June Cleaver of you.”

Annie made a dismissive motion with one hand. “June had it right. She knew there were some things men do better, and some things women do better.”

“Oh really? Like what?”

“Like cleaning. Like cooking. I don’t want Mitchell in my kitchen and he doesn’t want me in his barn. He doesn’t want me on his tractor, sweating under the hot sun while I mow acres of lawn. There are some advantages to being the weaker sex.”

“The weaker sex?” Mel scoffed. “The weaker sex?” She looked around at the others as if to confirm the ridiculous nature of this statement. “Is that why we produce seventy-five to ninety percent of all the world’s agriculture? Is that why we have a higher tolerance for pain, because we’re weaker?”

“Our brains are smaller. Boys are better at math and science than girls.”

Mel stared at Annie, her mouth sagging with disbelief. “Who says?”

“Michael Tillman in Boys and Girls Learn in Different Ways!”

Mel took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Okay, Tillman is a novelist with a graduate degree in creative writing. Is this the guy you want to get your biological gender information from?”

Annie, seemingly unaffected by this, said, “He did brain scans and stuff Men’s brains are bigger than women’s.”

“Yes, Annie, and men’s bodies are generally bigger than women’s. What does that prove? Women score the same as men on intelligence tests.”

“Let’s change the subject,” Sara said.

“Don’t tell me you don’t want to step in here,” Mel said to her. “Because I know you do.”

“I deal with conflict resolution in my job. I don’t want to deal with it on vacation.”

“Way to cop out,” Mel said.

Fifty feet offshore a school of bluefish turned the water silver. Sara, watching, thought she saw a dark fin, but when she looked again, it was gone.

“What exactly is your job?” Lola asked Sara sweetly, trying to change the subject. She liked conflict even less than Sara did.

“I’m a guardian ad litem, meaning I represent the rights of a child whose parents are going through a particularly nasty divorce and child-custody battle. These children are at risk for depression, academic decline, behavioral difficulties, and future substance abuse. You would not believe what some parents put their children through.”

“You see?” Mel said. “Going back to my earlier argument that marriage is archaic and unnatural.”

“I can tell you right now, it’s the only situation that makes sense for raising children,” Sara said. “No child wants his or her parents to get divorced. And I don’t care how amicable parents try to make a divorce, the children suffer.”

“I have some friends who did it right,” Mel said. “They bought houses a few blocks from each other and they share custody and seem to get along really well.”

“Well, I don’t know them personally but I’ll bet if someone had asked their children, they would have said, Don’t divorce”

Annie said, “In our parents’ day they were more responsible. No one got divorced until after the children were grown. Nowadays people trade spouses as frequently as they trade cars.”

“I guess I’d expect you to advocate a return to good old Republican family values,” Mel said. “Never mind how damaging these situations were to women, never mind the abuse women had to put up with for generations.”

“No one’s talking about abuse,” Sara said quickly. “That’s a different matter entirely.”

Annie propped herself up on her elbows and stared at Mel. “How do you know what I’d advocate?” she asked coldly. “Who are you to judge me?”

Her response was so unexpected that no one knew what to say. Even Mel seemed surprised. She smiled ruefully and said, “You’re right, Annie. Sorry. I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions like that.”

Annie put her head down on her arms.

“Anyway,” Sara continued. “I represent the child. I research the current living situation and make recommendations to the court regarding custody and other issues affecting the child.”

“Wow, that must be depressing work,” Mel said.

“Depressing and rewarding.” It was only a part-time job but Sara was tired when she got home in the evenings, and (sometimes) depressed. Tom didn’t particularly like the effect the job had on her, but he supported her nevertheless. He listened patiently while she droned on about other people’s dreary lives, and never complained. He seemed to know that it helped her deal better with the problems in her own life, that it helped her put it all in perspective. “More than ninety percent of the cases where a guardian ad litem is appointed never go to trial.”

“And that’s a good thing?”

“Yes. Because it means the parents have agreed to be reasonable and consider the best interests of their children.” Sara wrapped her arms tightly around her knees and stared at the sea. Out past the sandbar, a wave runner skimmed the surface of the sea, its engine whining. A gull hung motionless above the beach. “I can tell you one thing, though,” Sara continued drowsily. “Tom and I will never divorce. At least not while the children are young.”

“I’m glad Mitchell and I stuck it out,” Annie said in a muffled voice, her head still buried in her arms. “Although it was hard at times.”

“Most worthwhile things are,” Sara said.

“I guess I’m supposed to feel guilty for going through two husbands,” Mel said flatly. She sat up cross-legged, dusting the sand off her knees with the palms of her hands. “I’m supposed to feel guilty for buying in to the women’s movement?”

“No one’s talking about the women’s movement,” Sara said. “I’m talking about commitment.”

“Besides,” Annie said to Mel, lifting her head again. “It’s different for you. You don’t have children.” Annie was sometimes unintentionally cruel even when she meant to be kind.

“That’s right!” Mel said brightly, glancing at Sara, who colored and turned her face away. “I don’t have children. I’m too selfish and self-centered to ever have children.”

“No one said that,” Sara said.

“That’s what you’re all thinking.”

“Are you a mind reader?” Annie said. “Tell me what I’m thinking right now.”

“You’re thinking, Gee, I wish I wasn’t such an asshole.”

Sara laughed. Annie said, “Very funny.”

Lola, who’d sat quietly through this whole exchange, said mildly, “I’m so glad I only had Henry.”

No one thought of the significance of this remark until later.

Despite their decision to go in to lunch, no one moved. They continued to lay in various positions of repose against the warm sand while the sun reached its zenith, and began its slow descent toward the western horizon. The surf had begun to move farther up the beach and, from time to time, a large wave rolled in and lapped hungrily at their toes.

“We could play a couple of sets of tennis,” Mel said, her voice drowsy with the heat. “After lunch, I mean.”

“Tennis?” Annie moaned. “With this hangover? All I want to do is sleep.”

“Come on, the week’s half over,” Mel said. “We don’t have much time left. Let’s spend it doing something memorable.”

“What’s your definition of memorable?” Annie asked.

“As long as it doesn’t involve alcohol, I’m game,” Sara said.

“Speaking of games,” Mel said. “I’ve got one.” She ignored the others’ groans. “Each of us has to tell something about herself we don’t already know. Something shocking.”

“This sounds too much like truth or dare,” Sara said.

“I don’t want to play,” Annie said.

“Okay, I’ll go first,” Mel said. She grinned and looked around slyly. “I slept with the twenty-six-year-old UPS guy. The guy who delivers my packages. It was kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing. I didn’t plan it. It just happened. It was October, that magical time of year, and I had ordered a bunch of Halloween costumes from an online store and they all came at once. I opened the door and this gorgeous guy in a uniform was standing on my front stoop. It was the first snowfall of the year. Big wet flakes were falling from the sky like volcanic ash.”

“Don’t embellish it,” Sara said. “Don’t do that thing writers do. Don’t try and make it sound more romantic than it really was—a lonely forty-five-year-old woman taking advantage of a minimum-wage delivery boy.”

Mel laughed in a guarded way. It sounded sad when you put it that way, and truthful. It confirmed the feeling she’d had lately that she’d reached some kind of impasse in her life, an overwhelming place of stagnation and regret, not just in her professional life, but in her personal life, too. Once she had been confident and self-assured, but now she spent a lot of time second-guessing her choices.

“Actually,” Annie said, “I think you’re wrong about the minimum wage. UPS pays pretty well.”

“That’s not the point!” Sara snapped.

Out past the breaking surf, a narrow sandbar stretched across the water like a carpet. You could walk along it for nearly half a mile, until the tide came in, and then be swept out to sea.

“Lola? What about you?” Mel asked.

“We might have some of that shrimp scampi left,” Lola said, still thinking about lunch. “I could make a shrimp salad.”

Mel said, “Okay, Annie, how about you? Give us something we don’t know.”

“Yeah, Annie,” Sara said, relieved to be off the subject of the UPS driver. She didn’t want to argue with Mel again. Mel couldn’t help it that she was the way she was. She’d never had to think about anyone but herself. She’d never lain awake at night worrying over a sick child. She led a life breathtaking in its freedom and simplicity. “Surprise us.”

“Tell us something that’ll knock our socks off,” Mel said.

Annie thought, Oh, I could blow your socks clear across the beach. She said, “The women at my sons’ school used to call me Q-Tip.”

They all turned to stare at her. She sat huddled on the sand with her hat pulled down over her ears like an hombre in a bad Clint Eastwood movie.

Mel snorted. “See, I told you, you should color your hair.”

“What do you care what they think?” Sara said. “They don’t sound like the kind of people you’d want to be friends with anyway.” She smiled sadly at Annie.

“Poor Annie,” Lola said.

Mel wasn’t giving up. “Look, I can pick up a box of Miss Clairol at the village store. Then we’ll go back to the house and have a cocktail and I’ll dye your hair.”

“I’m not letting you color my hair,” Annie said. “Especially after you’ve been drinking.”

“It’ll wash out. We’ll go with something bright and sassy.”

“Forget it. That was years ago. I never see those women anymore.”

“My turn,” Lola said, clapping her hands with excitement. She had finally thought of something she could share. “Once I charged ten thousand dollars on my mother’s credit card and gave it to the United Negro College Fund. She’d given me her credit card to charge some new furniture. It wasn’t too long after Briggs and I got married and we were living in that little house over on Chariton. She told me to get some new furniture and new drapes and she gave me her credit card to pay for everything. They had this ad on TV, you know the one, ‘A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste.’ And I just thought that was so sad, you know. A wasted mind. So I called the number and donated ten thousand dollars.” She was breathless from telling it. She put her hand over her mouth and giggled.

Annie smiled at her in encouragement. Mel patted her knee. Sara thought how girlish Lola seemed, how vague and empty-headed, and yet for a swift, fleeting moment she wondered if it was all an act, if Lola wasn’t somehow putting them on.

“Speaking of wasted minds,” Mel said. “Let’s make up a batch of pomegranate martinis to take with us to tennis.”

They had no trouble getting a court time. The tennis courts, under the merciless midafternoon sun, were nearly deserted. They parked the golf cart and walked past the Beach Club, past a wide verandah littered with tables and chairs, where a few hardy souls were getting an early start on happy hour, and along a narrow asphalt trail that threaded its way between a collection of scattered courts.

The air was sultry and still. They walked in single file, Lola in front, followed by Sara and Annie, with Mel bringing up the rear. Palm trees swayed above them, catching what little breeze there was, and in tall stands of sparkleberry and wax myrtle, cicadas droned like buzz saws.

“Jesus,” Mel said. “I’m sweating like a plow mule. Whose idea was this anyway?”

“Right,” Sara said flatly. “What idiot suggested we play tennis?”

Annie swatted at a mosquito. “Why’d they put us down on the bottom courts?” she asked irritably. Already her tennis panties felt damp. Her thighs were chafed from the long walk from the parking lot. She’d tried to lose a few pounds before the trip, but all she’d managed to lose was an inch from her already-too-small waist. She carried all her weight in her hips and rear end; she was a perfect pear. She had what her mother so cheerfully called the Jameson thighs, which meant she could diet and ThighMaster for months and still wind up with saddle bags as flabby as jello sacks.

“It was probably A. Lincoln’s doing,” Sara said. “A. Lincoln probably figured out that Mel was in our party and put us out here in the wastelands to make up for Casino Night.”

Mel looked over her shoulder at the imposing Beach Club. She’d learned from experience never to underestimate an enemy. “Lola, whose name did you make the reservation in?”

“Mine.”

“He knows who we are,” Sara said. “You gave him your name that day on the croquet greens.”

Lola stopped and looked at her. “I did?” She was wearing an apricot-colored tennis skirt and top that showed off her tan, and her trim figure, nicely.

“Mel did.”

“He’s not going to remember the name,” Mel said, motioning for them to go on. “Besides, he doesn’t know it was me who pulled the dirty trick on Casino Night.”

“He’s probably got a pretty good idea,” Sara said.

They passed two clay courts where a group of senior citizens was playing. “Good day for tennis,” one of the men called and Lola called back gaily, “Wheatgrass is good for sunburn!”

“What’d she say?” one of the old men asked his partner.

Briggs had called during lunch and Lola had gone into her bedroom to take the call. When she came out later she looked like she’d been crying. She seemed all right now. She was prancing along as if she hadn’t a care in the world, and smiling, although there was something false and brittle about her smile.

They came to a lagoon crossed by a narrow bridge. An alligator slept in the murky water below. They could seem him clearly in the green depths. “Remind me not to go in after any tennis balls,” Mel said.

“That’s assuming we’re ever going to play any tennis,” Sara said. “That’s assuming we’re ever going to reach the court.” She wasn’t looking forward to this. She hadn’t played tennis in years, not since Adam was diagnosed and she’d dropped out of the Atlanta Lawn Tennis Association. She’d found then that in the overall scheme of things, tennis just wasn’t that important to her. There were so many things that weren’t important.

“Number Twenty!” Lola shouted, all excited, pointing to the sign hanging against the backdrop. “This is it!”

The other three went out on the court to warm up while Mel got set up. Tennis was a Very Big Deal to Mel. She and Sara had played sporadically in high school and college, but in the last ten years she’d joined an indoor tennis league and now she played twice a week with a group of highly competitive twenty-something career girls. She took a water bottle and a bag of Twizzlers candy out and laid them on the bench between the courts. She took a sun visor out of her bag and performed a series of brief stretching exercises.

When she was ready, she went out on to the court with the others. They played doubles for a while, switching partners to keep it interesting, and then they walked to the bench to take a water break. The shade here was paltry; a tall palm tree cast a slender shadow across the broiling asphalt. In the cloudless sky a buzzard circled endlessly.

“I wish I had a martini,” Mel said, sipping from her water bottle. They had somehow managed to talk her out of the pomegranate martinis.

“You can’t be serious,” Sara said. They all stood around the bench drinking from their bottles.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to drink alcohol when you exercise,” Annie said. “It dehydrates you. You start drinking in this heat, you’re likely to drop dead of a stroke.”

Mel took a long pull from her bottle, staring at Sara above the rim. She put the bottle down and wiped her mouth. “Pray that happens, girls,” she said. “It’s the only way you’ll ever beat me.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Sara said.

“It’s the only way you’d ever beat me in singles,” Mel said.

Sara picked up her racket. “Okay smart-ass,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Mel put her bottle away and followed Sara out on to the court. Lola sat down on the bench, absentmindedly bouncing her racket off the toe of one shoe. Annie called after Mel and Sara, “It’s too hot to play singles. Lola and I didn’t come out here to play singles.” She looked at Lola for confirmation of this statement, but Lola appeared deep in thought, staring down at her racket. She looked odd. Her head was tilted as if she was listening to distant music, and her lips moved soundlessly.

Annie turned her attention back to the court, where Mel and Sara stood facing each other across the net. “If I’d known we were playing singles,” she said in a sulky voice, “I wouldn’t have come.” She stood there with her tennis skirt flaring over her hips like a parachute, feeling hot and sweaty and fat.

“Just three games,” Sara said. “Just long enough for me to whip Mel’s ass so we can get on to other things.”

“Hey, I’m trying to serve here,” Mel said. “Stop talking.”

“Who said you could serve first?”

“Sorry. We’ll spin it.”

“My mouth tastes like yellow,” Lola said unexpectedly.

Sara watched Mel intently. She waved her hand and said, “Go ahead. Serve.” She glanced over at Annie, but Annie was watching Lola with a strange expression on her face.

“Are you sure?” Mel asked.

“Just do it,” Sara said.

Mel bounced the ball slowly. She had a killer first serve, although after that she was just as likely to hit it into the net. She tossed the ball high and leaned back.

“Rosa’s aura is like a peacock feather,” Lola said to no one in particular.

Annie frowned. “Who’s Rosa?” she asked.

Mel froze with her arm stretched behind her head. The ball dropped harmlessly to the ground, bounced several times, and rolled against the fence. She slowly lowered her arms and sighed, tapping the toe of one shoe repeatedly with her racket. “Girls, I’m trying to serve here,” she said with exaggerated patience.

“Okay,” Lola said. She put her racket up in front of her face. “Sorry,” she said.

Palm fronds stirred lazily with the breeze. The sun beat down on their heads.

Mel bounced the ball and looked at Sara. “Ready?” she asked.

Sara got serious again. “Ready.”

Mel crouched down in position. She tossed the ball high overhead and leaned back into her serve. Everyone waited, watching quietly.

Lola said, “Mel, can I have a Twizzler?”

The ball dropped to the court. Sara put her hands on her knees and looked at her feet. Over on the bench, Lola began to giggle.

Sara won, two games to one, although they went to deuce every game. Mel flung her racket over the fence into a palmetto thicket and had to go in to retrieve it, and after that they played doubles again, Mel and Annie on one side of the net and Lola and Sara on the other. Lola was a good tennis player. She had the long, pretty strokes that denoted a privileged childhood spent in private tennis lessons. She was fine for the first few games, but after a while she stopped playing and stood there looking at the sky or staring at her racket as the ball whizzed by.

“Lola, are you all right?” Sara asked. She was leaning on her racket, trying to catch her breath. She’d just run across the court trying to hit one of Annie’s lobs while Lola stood at the net looking at her feet.

Lola was staring at the bottom of one shoe with a look of amazement on her face. “Look,” she said, holding her foot up so they could see it. “There’s a hole in my shoe.”

Sara was reminded of her earlier impression that Lola was putting them on. “Let’s take a water break,” she wheezed.

“Fine,” Mel said. “It’s our serve anyway.”

They went over to the bench and sat down. The sun had moved in the sky, and the shade cast by the palm had lengthened, so that now it was almost pleasant sitting there. Mel poured water over the back of her neck. Annie and Sara sipped their water bottles. Lola sat down and took her shoe off.

“Lola, what are you doing?” Mel asked. “We’re between games.” The score was three to two and they were ahead, so Mel had no intention of stopping now.

“I’ve got a hole in my shoe,” Lola said, holding it up.

“So what? Put it back on.”

“Okay.”

They watched Lola put her shoe back on. The courts were beginning to fill up again, as the late-afternoon sun died and the cool of evening began to glide across the landscape. Courts Sixteen and Seventeen were full, and everywhere now came the steady pleasant thock of tennis balls hitting racket strings. Annie stood watching the foursome on Court Sixteen play The perspiration she had worked up during the warm-up had long since dissipated. Mel was a maniac on the court—she poached balls left and right—and after a while Annie had been content to simply stand on the baseline and hit an occasional lob, a shot Mel steadfastly refused to use. With Lola focused, it had been an intense match, with them going to deuce for the first three games, but now that Lola had lost interest, Sara was having a hard time of it.

The women on Court Sixteen were probably in their sixties and seventies, and they played at a leisurely pace that Annie could relate to. She liked a slow, unhurried game, which probably helped explain her hips and those troublesome Jameson thighs. She wasn’t fat, but she was matronly, whereas Mel and Sara had somehow managed to hang on to their college figures and Lola seemed to be mysteriously regressing toward girlhood. Whatever heartbreak Lola was dealing with in her marriage, it hadn’t put a wrinkle in her face or a single dimple in her thighs, and there was something to be said for that.

Annie sighed and tugged her skirt down over her hips. She wondered what Paul Ballard would say if he could see her now. Would he recognize her if she passed him on the street with her white hair and Jameson thighs? Surely he would recognize the Jameson thighs. But no, when she’d known him her figure had been trim almost to the point of anorexia. She’d been unable to eat when she first met him, which was one of the ways she’d known she was falling in love: a complete cessation of all desires except for one, a general lack of hunger that gradually grew into troubling symptoms of nausea and malaise.

Watching the women on Court Sixteen, Annie tried to remember if she had ever lost her appetite when she first met Mitchell. But that was more than thirty years ago, shrouded in adolescent dreams and desires, and she couldn’t remember the specifics now. The mature Mitchell did not like skinny women. He liked his women to have what he fondly called “a little cushion.” Even now she had to be careful not to let him come up behind her when she was bent over cleaning a baseboard or scrubbing mildew off the bathtub grout.

“A penny for your thoughts,” Sara said, gently bumping Annie with her racket.

Annie flushed. “What?” she asked.

“I think Annie has a secret,” Mel said, leaning back with her bottle resting on her thigh. “I think there’s something Annie isn’t telling us.”

“Those women on Court Sixteen just went to deuce,” Annie said. Mel was right. Despite the little stories she told them about Mitchell, she knew how to keep a secret. She knew how to keep it safe. She made a place for it, a little nest under her heart. She carried it around inside her like an egg.

“She doesn’t want to tell us anything else because she’s afraid you’ll put it in one of your damn books,” Sara said.

“I don’t write about people I know,” Mel said.

“Sure you do.”

“I thought you didn’t read my books.”

“I never said that.”

“Yes, you did. You said you stopped reading my books because you got tired of seeing yourself as the villain.”

“Well, there is that.”

“And speaking of stories, you’re the only one who didn’t play the game on the beach. You didn’t think I was going to forget, did you? You’re the only one who didn’t tell us something about yourself that no one else knows.”

Annie plucked at the strings of her racket, glad to have the attention off of herself. “I doubt Sara has anything to confess.”

“We all have something to confess,” Mel said.

“But not Sara.”

Sara looked out at the shady court and said quietly, “I once withheld evidence in a child-abuse case. The mother was guilty as sin of other things, but not what she was being charged with, but I didn’t want the child returned to her. So I suppressed the evidence that might have cleared her and the child was placed in foster care.” She waited, as if daring anyone to say anything. She wasn’t even sure why she’d told them. She’d never told anyone before, not even Tom.

Mel stretched her legs out in front of her and looked at Sara with a curious expression. “So in other words, you played judge and jury.”

“Yes.”

“You have a bad habit of doing that.”

Sara said nothing, turning her head to watch the women on Court Sixteen. A pair of gulls hung motionless above them, their bright beady eyes glittering in the sunlight.

“Couldn’t you be disbarred for that?”

“Yes,” she said.

Lola stood up suddenly and walked off. “Where are you going?” Mel called. “We’re not finished yet.”

“I have to tinkle,” Lola said over her shoulder, waving at them with her racket. She walked with a jaunty step, the hem of her skirt flouncing and swaying gaily.

They watched her walk across the bridge and stroll up the narrow winding path between the courts. “Shouldn’t one of us go with her?” Sara said.

“She’s all right,” Mel said. “She can’t get lost between here and the clubhouse.”

Forty-five minutes later, Mel pulled her cell phone out of her bag to check the time. “Well, shit,” she said. “I guess we’re finished for the day.”

“Where do you think she is?” Sara asked, zipping her racket into her bag.

“Who knows.”

Annie, who’d finally succumbed to the heat and the boredom by dozing off, yawned and stood up slowly. She groaned and stretched her arms over her head. “I’m so sore,” she said. “I won’t be able to move tomorrow.”

“How can you be sore when you didn’t do anything?” Mel asked. She stood up and began to pack her gear.

“I can’t help it if you’re a poacher. I can’t help it if you hardly let me hit anything.”

“Hey, we were winning, weren’t we?”

“You were ahead one game,” Sara reminded them. “That’s not exactly winning.”

“I’m not playing with you again,” Annie told Mel. “If we play tomorrow, I’ll be Sara’s partner. Or Lola’s.”

“That’s assuming we can find Lola.”

“Is it my imagination,” Mel asked, “or does Lola seem a bit more addled than usual?”

“More addled,” Sara said.

“Definitely more addled,” Annie said. “She was fine until Briggs called.”

Mel stared ahead at the shadowy path threading its way between the courts. “If Briggs calls again, let me talk to him.”

“Maybe I should just unplug the phone,” Annie said.

“No, don’t do that,” Sara said. “There might be an emergency.”

Mel said, “I think she’s taking something. I think she’s heavily medicated.”

Sara shook her head. “We don’t know that. Besides …” she began, and stopped.

“Besides what?” Mel asked.

“Nothing.”

Annie swung her bag over her shoulder. “But how do we know if she’s taking pills?”

“Easy,” Mel said, starting up the path ahead of them. “We ask her.”

Lola was up in the clubhouse, trying on a tennis skirt. When they came through the double glass doors, she was standing in front of a three-sided mirror, turning back and forth. She seemed surprised to see them. “What do you think?” she asked, smoothing the tennis skirt with her hands. “Isn’t it adorable?”

Mel let her tennis bag slide to her feet. She turned around and walked a few paces, stopping beside a rack of shirts and staring fixedly out the plate-glass window. Sara said patiently, “Lola, we’ve been waiting for you.”

Lola’s eyes widened. “You have?”

“Yes. For nearly an hour.”

“We were right in the middle of a set,” Annie reminded her. “Did you forget?”

From the checkout counter, the salesclerk watched them curiously.

Lola stared at herself in the glass. “You were waiting for me?”

“Don’t you remember?”

She studied her reflection intently. She nodded slightly. “Yes,” she said. “I think I do.” Her eyes clouded for a moment but then brightened again. She twirled around on her toes like a ballerina. “What do you think?” she asked, indicating the skirt.

“We were right in the middle of a game,” Annie said. “You and Sara against me and Mel.”

“That’s right,” Lola said, nodding her head emphatically. “Now I remember.”

“You went to take a potty break.”

Lola smiled brightly at them in the glass. “I remember,” she said. “Sorry.”

Mel turned around and came back. She leaned in close to Lola, and in a low, fierce voice asked, “Lola, are you taking anything? Pills. I’m talking about pills.”

Lola stared at her with a vacant expression. She plucked at the skirt. “This is on sale,” she said.

“That’s right,” the girl at the counter said brightly. “Fifty percent off. Everything in the store.”

“Thank you!” Mel said, rounding on the clerk. “We’re just looking, okay?” She tugged Lola’s arm, pulling her into the back of the store. Sara and Annie followed.

“Let’s take her back to the house to interrogate her,” Sara said uneasily.

“Good idea.”

They watched as Lola, seemingly unconcerned by the conversation, went over and began to pick through a basket of tennis panties. “Whatever has happened, I blame Briggs,” Sara said.

“No one’s disputing that,” Mel said heavily.

“You were the one who wanted her to marry that asshole.”

Mel gave her a steady look. “I don’t recall telling anyone who they should marry.”

“You have a short memory then.”

Annie stepped between them. “Let’s not do this here,” she said.