Last Summer at the Tennis Shop
The summer I was eleven, my sister Corinne worked at the front desk of the country club tennis courts. The little shop offered balls, racquets, and the kind of pastel tennis skirts that always seemed in conversation with each other but that nobody ever came in to buy. Visors hugged on the racks. Koozies lay in front of the register. Corinne would sit at the computer all day and wait for someone to want something. We didn’t belong to the country club, but we lived about a mile away. So, a few minutes after she left for work in her Jeep, I left for work on my bike. I wore pink bandanas and baggy green t-shirts that flapped as I rode. Eleven years old, I was ripe as a mango.
Parking my bike in the rack, I walked over to the store and promptly joined Corinne behind the counter. There we played country music and a computer game called Marbles. Sometimes I’d bring lunch, or a cup of lemonade, or one of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants books to read when her boss stopped by. In the whole of that summer, I can only recall three or four people ever coming into the shop, but I can still feel the air conditioning against my big, green t-shirt. Corinne was heading to college in the fall, and while college only meant moving three miles from home, I sensed our days of Marbles and lemonade were numbered. I biked to the shop every day.
