Who did want their father killed? I have no idea. I look out the window at the cold, muddy fields. A new planting season is just around the corner.

“You don’t seem to be enjoying this,” Amy calls from the other side of the net.

“We don’t have to play anymore.”

“I’m fine,” I say, forcing a grimace to become a smile as I stoop to pick up the ball that comes rolling back toward me. I have just hit my

backhand into the same spot on the net for the third time in a row. In tennis, as in other aspects of my life, I have a way of perfecting my mistakes.

“I’m just getting sick of being so consistent.”

We meet at the bench where I sit down and grab my opponent’s water bottle. I can’t use the weather as an excuse: the temperature is a balmy 68 degrees, and the sun has stayed behind a mostly cloudy sky.

Though it is only the first day of March, it looks like an early spring.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were this good?” I complain.

“I could have prepared my ego for this little setback.” Regardless of how liberated I tell myself I’ve become in the last twenty years, it is no fun being beaten by a woman. Amy, during warmups, casually informed me she is a legitimate 4.5 player under the United States Tennis Association rating system. Though in theory I can hit the ball harder and can cover the court more easily, my genetic head-start has proved to be as useless as a long-range Arkansas weather forecast. Now, in the second set (I won two games in the first) Amy zips around the court and is whacking the ball past me like some wind-up Steffi Grafdoll.

Amy, who has barely worked up a sweat, straightens the strings on her racket.

“You just need to practice. And to bend your knees on your backhand.

You look like you’re trying to putt a golf ball.” She stands and