Mixed Doubles

Chapter Originals

Marisa Cardoso is twenty-seven, ranked forty-one in the world, and has spent eleven years being described as the hardest worker on the tour, which is what people say about a player they have decided is not talented. Milo Reyes is thirty, was ranked nine at twenty-three, has had four operations on the same shoulder, and is now one hundred and eleven and falling. They have known each other since they were fourteen. They have never once been on the same side of anything. In the January her coach and his agent — who have been talking behind both their backs for six weeks — put them into the mixed doubles at four tournaments, for the money, for the ranking points, and because a thirty-year-old man with a shoulder and a woman who has never got past the fourth round have both run out of other ideas. They lose the first one in forty-one minutes and do not speak in the car. And then in the second one, in a dead rubber on an outside court in front of about ninety people, Milo Reyes does something at the net in the eleventh game that Marisa Cardoso has not seen anybody do since she was fourteen — and she turns round and finds out that he has been doing it for eleven years and that nobody has ever once been in the right place to receive it.