Page 73 of Love All

She was the one you were playing beside.

She winks, which she’d have died before doing a year ago, and goes back to the net to play doubles with me. The game I spent my whole life avoiding, because doubles means there’s a side that isn’t yours to cover, and you have to trust the person covering it. She avoided it worse than me. Two only children. Two singles players. Two people who’d rather lose alone than win owing somebody.

And here we are. One court. One score. Each of us guarding the half the other can’t reach.

The umpire settles into the chair. Charlotte sets her feet. She looks back at me one more time,I’ve got this side, you take that one,the most ordinary thing in the sport, the thing that landed in my spine like a struck note the very first day and hasn’t stopped — and I nod, and she nods, and we’re ready.

I won’t know if we win. I know that sounds like a lie, coming from me, the guy who trained for a bouncy-castle exhibition. But I genuinely won’t be able to tell you the score at the end, and the fact that I won’t is the whole point of the last year of my life. There was a version of me who could tell you the score of a match he played half-asleep three years ago, because the score was the only part of anything he let himself feel. This version is too busy being inside the actual thing to keep the receipt. We’ll play well. We’ll laugh at ourselves at least twice. At some point she’ll poach a ball that’s clearly mine, and I’ll let her have it and tell her she’s a menace, and she’ll tell me I’m crowding the middle again, and the crowd will love us, and none of that is the score, and all of it is what I’ll remember.

“Love all,” the umpire says.

The starting score. Zero-zero. Nothing-nothing.

And that’s the thing I finally hear, standing at the baseline in the spring light with the best person I know at the net in front of me. I’ve spent twenty-two years on courts hearing that word mean nothing.Love.The score before anyone’s earned a point. The tennis joke. The thing that equals zero. The reason the whole sport keeps count in a language where love is just the word for having nothing yet.

It’s not nothing. It was never nothing. It’s the one thing on the whole board you don’t have to earn before you’re allowed to have it. You just have to be brave enough to stop keeping score long enough to notice you’ve been standing in it the entire time. She figured that out first, in a doorway, two hours after the worst loss of her life. I figured it out about a second behind her, which,for a guy who used to need a head start on everything, felt like winning.

“Love all,” he says, and for the first time in my life it isn’t true, because there is nothing zero about it.

I serve. She covers her side. I cover mine. And we play the whole thing out together, in every sense of the word, on that court and off it — all the way to the end, and past it.

I’m not keeping score anymore. So I’ll just tell you: we’re still playing.