Pickleballers

Chapter Fifteen

Fifteen

Meg bent to stretch her knees and shoulders. She was glad for the additional practice with Annie. It would hone her skills for her upcoming practice with Ethan. The anticipation excited her, as did the tension of wanting to impress him. All the court time in the three days since their arrival on Bainbridge burned her shoulders and glutes. But her body felt strong and well tuned.

It had been a long time since she had felt desire, and been desired in turn, and this made her world sparkle. Here at the Founders Courts, the landscape shimmered brighter than the other day, the grass lusher and the players more jubilant.

While she and Annie dinked in the kitchen, the familiar pick-pock of their bouncing pickleball reverberated on the pavement and fanned out into the open spaces by the soccer and ball fields. An older man walking his dog paused to watch them and asked, “What’s that game called?” He hmphed at the name and said, “Looks like fun. Maybe I’ll give it a try sometime.”

Annie smiled when he left. “If I had a dollar for every time someone said exactly that…”

“You’d have two dollars?”

“At least.”

Nearby, on the repurposed tennis courts, Coach Chad dinked over the net while a bevy of white-haired friends gossiped and laughed as they waited to rotate into the lesson. Because of the afternoon heat, other than the Island Haven retirement community van, the lot was nearly empty of cars. Meg guessed it wouldn’t remain so long. As the day wore on and the weather cooled down, Islanders of all ages would arrive to de-stress after work.

They moved to either side of the court and Annie knocked it over the net with a diagonal dink. “You know, you’ve inspired me,” Annie reflected. She kept a steady patter going to the rhythm of the bouncing ball. “I’m going to try to make myself…more open to new opportunities. Like you did with Ethan.”

Over lunch, Annie had lapped up every detail of Meg’s description of her encounter with Ethan on the original courts. By then, the Lakeview courts had reopened, and their group chat confirmed that another note, the one about cleaning the moss off the asphalt, had been recovered from the trash. Both Annie and Meg suspected Jeannie, Lakeview’s official pot-stirrer, of tossing the evidence.

Annie pressed on. “No, really. I’m impressed. You are putting yourself out there. I don’t think I’d have the nerve to, you know, unbutton enough to kiss a guy I’d just met. I guess what I’m saying is,” Annie chatted on, “I’d like to be more available. Put myself out there.”

“Like risk it for the biscuit ,” Meg teased. “What does that mean, anyhow? Is there some biscuit that everyone wants?”

“Is it a dog biscuit?” Annie opined. “Or is it a cookie biscuit? And what’s the trade-off? I mean, biscuits are pretty low value in my opinion.”

“There are things in this world we may never fully understand.” Just then, Annie lobbed the ball. Leaping to reach it, Meg swung at the air, missing the ball by a good foot.

“Woo-hoo. Point!” Annie called. “No falling asleep at the wheel. You should have seen that coming.” She coached, “When I scoop my paddle low, you should turn and start running right away so you’re at the baseline in time for the return. I love me a good lob. Did you know a lob follows a perfect parabolic curve?”

Leave it to Annie to love pickleball because of the math involved. “That is fascinating .”

“Did you know that the diameter of a parabola is called the latus rectum?”

“ You’re a latus rectum.” Meg’s shot dropped right at the baseline.

“Your momma is a latus rectum—” Annie called, racing for the return. When she came up short, she gaped at Meg. “Wow. Great shot!”

Meg panted as she reveled in her victory, a genuine smile blooming on her face.

Strolling to the net, Annie gave her a congratulatory paddle tap. “A few months ago, you’d never picked up a paddle. Now look at you! When you and Rooster get to play in the tournament, you two will smoke the competition.”

The ache in Meg’s triceps called out to her, and both ladies concurred that it was time to pause for a fiver. “So…” Meg started, “I heard Bainbridge is playing in Picklesmash. With Ethan in their beginners’ slot.” She might as well spill the whole story. “And they want me to play with him.”

Annie’s eyes grew to the size of coffee saucers. “What?! The nerve!”

“I’m not going to. But I told Ethan I’d practice with him. Just because Rooster doesn’t have a lot of availability.” Flustered, she explained, “I just don’t want you to think I’m going behind Lakeview’s back. And…I really want you to like him.”

Annie’s expression shifted, and her eyes brimmed with empathy. “Meg.” She shook her head like she was about to explain what should have been a given. “You don’t have to justify it to me. You like him. And I like you . So according to the transitive property of equality, I already do like him.”

The logic was lost on her, but Meg felt a weight being lifted. Annie opened her arms.

“Come here,” Annie said, gesturing. “You know you can tell me anything and I will never not love you.” She crushed Meg into a bear hug and rocked her friend back and forth for a reassuring minute.

Finally, Meg muttered, “Okay. But I’m telling everybody you used a double negative.”

Giving Meg a decisive squeeze, Annie’s chipmunk voice whispered into Meg’s hair, “When a double negative conveys a positive, it’s grammatically correct.”

Meg’s laugh came out as part snort, part cry. She was just so grateful for Annie’s all-forgiving friendship.

“Hi-de-ho, ladies.” Rooster appeared, toting his paddle. Spotting the fresh emotion on Meg’s face, he asked, “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

Annie tapped her paddle against his. “You’re just in time. Meg, you ready?”

She sniffled, smiling with the relief of the recently unburdened. “I could go for another game or two.”

Rooster gave her a smug grin, accepting the challenge. “A game or two? Oh, you better paddle up. ’Cause we’re playin’ till the wheels come off.”

·····

A new stream of picklers trickled onto the courts, having come straight from work. Meg noticed one guy slip off his tie and change into pickleball shoes, while two cars over, a woman bent over in her passenger seat used her car as a phone booth and emerged as a pickleball superhero. Meg buzzed like she always did when the pickleball forces gathered—feeling that anticipation that she might win a game. Or lose a game. Or simply play a game.

For the next two hours, Meg played so hard that her sports bra could be wrung out into a shot glass. Even so, every few moments, her hits suffered from distraction when a reminder of Ethan’s existence would ping her brain. They had planned to meet up the next evening when he finished working, and the thought of hitting with the hottie popped up as often as pickleballs on a learner’s court.

At last, Rooster and Meg hobbled off the courts, spent. Annie, who had joined them for a water break, offered Meg a wry smile. “You should rest up. You’ll wanna be fresh for your game tomorrow.”

“Game?” Rooster asked.

“Meg has a play date.”

“Glad to hear it. I’m rootin’ for ya, kiddo.” And it was clear that she and Ethan had Rooster in their court.

Behind Annie, movement caught Meg’s attention when a sleek sedan glided into a parking spot. Marilyn stepped out of the car, but before Meg could call out a greeting, her words halted in her throat. A second car had arrived in the lot a few spaces beyond Marilyn, and a tall figure stepped out. Her brain took a moment to make sense of the familiar vision: the anchorman hair, the broad shoulders, and the goofy smile. Meg gasped. After all her searching: Michael Edmonds!

Rooster must have caught a glimpse of him, too. His shoulders jumped and he squinted across the parking lot. “What the…? !”

“What is it?” Annie asked, turning her head over her shoulder, searching, just as Michael strode behind a red cedar.

“Michael Edmonds!” Rooster mouthed to Meg while Annie’s head was still turned.

“I know!” Meg repeated soundlessly, her face equally distorted with disbelief. Meg had given Rooster the rundown about Marilyn’s claim, that he was “Bainbridge’s secret weapon.” And both hoped that Michael’s coaching would not give Bainbridge too much of a leg up. Still, Meg hadn’t yet told Annie what she had learned. She needed to be certain her intel was founded on fact before she told Annie anything. But here he was, impossible to miss. Michael Edmonds at a Bainbridge Island pickleball court.

Confused, Annie swiveled back. “What are we looking at?”

“Nothing…” Even to her own ears, it didn’t pass for believable.

Rooster came to the rescue. “Birds,” he said. “Bainbridge is famous for…strange birds. Important ones. Look!” He pointed into the cedar branches. “A…a…”

Annie wasn’t buying it. “A. What.”

“A tufted…red-beaked…downy…thing.”

Slowly, Annie turned back and studied the tree suspiciously.

“Help! Somebody, help!” came a woman’s voice from the court holding the seniors’ lessons.

Alerted, Rooster’s attentions leapt to the courts. “Somebody’s down!” he cried. “It’s Chad. Coach Chad’s in trouble!”

“Get a doctor,” came a cry from the courts.

The birds forgotten, Annie perked up. “I’m a doctor!” Her spine straightened with readiness. “I’m coming!” she shouted before taking off at a sprint.

Meg followed with Rooster loping behind. By the time they caught up, Annie was in full-tilt doctor mode. Although Chad stood on his feet, his face was tomato red. He listed sideways and had thrown his arms out to steady himself.

Annie asked, “Are you okay? What’s going on?” Chad’s face swelled. He gesticulated wildly.

The eight older ladies—all wearing sporty leggings, turtleneck shirts, and recently styled hairdos—shrugged their bewilderment. A squat woman in shatterproof goggles explained with maddening patience, “We were in between drills, and…Coach Chad—” Her hands fluttered at Chad, whose eyes flamed with panic. “Coach Chad was looking parched. And then Pearl here”—she gestured to her friend—“offered him some grapes from her garden, and then suddenly…”

Eyes bulging, Chad clutched at his throat.

Annie engaged. She gripped Chad’s shoulder and spun the muscly man with a fountain of force. Positioning herself, Annie clasped her hands beneath his diaphragm and thrust upward. Bullet-like, a large, green grape flew from Chad’s mouth and soared across the courts.

Chad sucked in a lungful of air. He sank to the asphalt, supporting himself with a hand on the hot pavement while he caught his breath. Annie knelt beside him and checked his pulse.

Panting for air, Marilyn raced onto the scene. “Chad!”

“I called the paramedics,” Pearl told the group.

“Will he be okay?” asked an elderly woman with circus-orange hair.

“Yes,” Annie assured her. “He’ll be fine. But that ambulance is a good idea—just to have him checked out.”

Other bystanders streamed onto the scene. “That was amazing!” one newcomer effused. “You saved him!” another said.

Then a new voice spoke up. “You jumped right in there with such…passionate abandon.”

Annie turned her head, and her face blanched as she spotted none other than Michael Edmonds. There he stood, steps behind the gawking bystanders, smiling at Annie as if she were half the saints and all the unicorns rolled into one.

Annie blinked. Her gaze told a thousand tales. She spoke wordlessly of an ocean’s worth of hours spent pining for his love, of how their time together racing to the net, matching strides, side by side was more than a simple partnership. How when he dashed to retrieve a well-angled cross shot, she, as if on a pulley or attached by a rubber band, moved in tandem. Not everybody had what they had. In Annie’s fantasy-ridden mind, this was more than simply a pickleball connection. This was love. And now the tenderness in his words confirmed that he felt the same way.

At least that’s what Meg read in Annie’s gaze.

“Passionate. Abandon,” Annie repeated slowly, turning the phrase over in her mouth. Her thin voice warbled. “Oh, Michael Edmonds.”

Michael tilted his head in what appeared to be confusion. Maybe he was having an out-of-context moment, but it looked to Meg like he had forgotten Annie’s name.

“Annie,” Meg offered quietly.

His lips lifted, captivated by her achievement. “Annie,” he said. “You are an angel.”

Annie stood. The concentration in her expression shifted from lifesaving mode to a more intense sort of determination. She stepped over Chad’s prone figure, taking care not to step on his fingers. She cut through the circle of bystanders and beelined it to Michael Edmonds.

Annie Yoon hesitated only a moment, her petite frame tensed with decisiveness. Then, she rose onto her tiptoes, threw her arms around his shoulders, and planted one smack-dab on Michael Edmonds’s lips.

If Michael was surprised, he did not show it. He kissed Annie back, more profoundly than might have been appropriate with all the octogenarians around. If there had been any question of whether Michael Edmonds’s interest in Annie extended beyond pickleball, that sizzling kiss was the answer. When at last he broke away, he shook his head to clear the fog. “Well,” he said. “That was…unexpected.”

Sirens blaring, an ambulance arrived, and the paramedics cleared a path through the throng. One of the seniors gestured to Annie, and an EMT tapped her on the shoulder. “You the doctor?” he asked. Annie smiled into the distance, her face fixed on the tree branches, her body detached from the chaos around her. “Excuse me. You the doctor?” he repeated.

She blinked away her dreaminess and shifted back to attention. “Yes. I’m Dr. Yoon.”

Meg glanced between Annie and Michael and back again. This must be what Annie meant when she’d said Meg had inspired her to take bold chances. Annie hadn’t just opened the door to new possibilities, she had taken it square off its hinges.