“I owed you that honesty, I thought. So you could assess better—how to grow, how to widen your perspective. It felt like it was time for that. But you didn’t want to do that then, and you don’t want to do that now.
“I’ve messed up a lot as your father, and I take responsibility for that. But this one, I’m sorry, only you can solve it. You have to make peace with not being a perfect player,” he said.
“That is giving up. I won’t do it,” I said.
My father shakes his head. “You have to find a way to be right with who you actually are, to face what life is really like. I expected you to figure that out by now. But you haven’t. And if you don’t, I can’t see how you ever get past this…this moment. You have accomplished so much, but you are instead so focused on keeping it, rather than going out and finding something else in the world.”
He walks toward the door. “Everything we achieve is ephemeral. We have it, and then the next second it’s gone. You had that record, and you may lose that record. Or you may defend it now and lose it in two years all over again. I wish you’d accept that.”
I shake my head and try to look at him. “I can’t.”
“Well,” he says. “It kills me that I cannot fix that for you, hija. But I can’t. Nobody else can.”
And then, as if the door were the lightest thing in the world, he opens it and walks right through, leaving me there alone.
* * *
—
When I finally make my way back to my floor at the hotel, I come out of the elevator to see Bowe standing in front of my door, signing an autograph for a teenage girl. She walks away before she sees me approaching.
When I get to Bowe, he says, “I wasn’t sure if you’d want me here or not. But I figured you wouldn’t be shy about telling me to fuck off if you didn’t.”
I drop my things and hug him. I can feel his surprise, but he quickly puts his arms around me. He does it gently, mindful of his ribs.
“Dust yourself off. Your best surface is just around the bend,” he says.
His arms are warm and sturdy. His body is strong. I feel like I could go slack against him and he’d hold me up, that he could bear my weight—the weight of my body, the weight of my failure.
* * *
—
“I was worried people would stop respecting my record if Nicki beat it. But now…I’m…I’m just ruining my record myself.”
I am sitting with my feet on the coffee table, my head resting against the back of the sofa. Bowe is in the chair opposite me, trying to find a position that doesn’t hurt his ribs.
“I don’t think that’s true,” he says. “I think people respect the attempt. I think they will respect the attempt even more than the achievement. Which will happen. You will achieve it.”
I look at him and frown. “C’mon.”
“I’m serious.”
I look up at the ceiling. “My father thinks my priorities are all fucked-up.”
Bowe laughs softly. “I don’t think there is a dad alive who believes in their child more than he believes in you. You see that, right?”
I look at Bowe. “Yeah,” I say. “I do.”
Bowe leans back slowly. I can tell he is at least feeling better than before. “You’re lucky,” he says.
“You mean because of my dad?”
“Yeah.”
“Didn’t your dad play tennis?” I ask. “Isn’t that how you started?”
“My uncle,” Bowe says. “Yeah. And I was never good enough. Nothing I ever did was good enough. But I just kept trying to please him. And I just kept failing.”
“And your parents?”
“They didn’t care. My father was a mathematician. My mom is still a math teacher. They didn’t understand my obsession with tennis and would have preferred, I think, that I did something a bit more…traditional.”
“They wanted you to be a doctor or a lawyer?”
“Or a mathematician,” Bowe says.
I laugh. “So you’re what happens when you don’t do what your dad wants, and I’m what happens when you do exactly what your dad wants.”
Bowe laughs.
“And now we’re both disasters,” I say.
Bowe shakes his head. “You’re not, Soto. I know you can’t see it—because you’re one of those annoying kids in school who thinks getting ninety-nine on the test only means you didn’t get one hundred.”
“It does mean that.”