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Julie to dash herself over and over and over against the impervious wall of Gigi Janeway’s tennis game. Roger’s daughter was guided by an artistic temperament. Capricious and creative and capable of flights of giddy inspiration, Julie played the game with volatile abandon. She was a poet on those strict and unforgiving courts. Lithe and inventive, mesmerizing in her finest moments, she had a dazzling array of shots and angles and paces and spins that sent the balls skidding away from her opponent’s racquet as if charmed.
    On other days, however, when Julie’s juices were not flowing, when the muse deserted her, she simply crumpled under the fractional weight of air. She could be sluggish and erratically self-destructive and painful to watch. Sometimes she fell into a daze of slow -motion awkwardness, eyes unlocked from the moment, stumbling about on the green clay as if she no longer cared about the game of tennis or about anything else on earth.
    At her finest moments, Julie exposed Gigi for the mindless automaton that she was, yo-yoing her from side to side and up and back, twisting and turning the girl until she had to be dizzy, using her vast array of spins and speeds to search out the tiny chinks in Gigi’s heavy armor. But those glorious momentscame and went like fragile wisps of starlight. Julie had so far been unable to sustain her quicksilver magic for an entire match against Gigi’s inexhaustible onslaught.
    In the small town of Sand Hills, in the tennis crazy county of Palm Cove, Gigi was the unfailing winner and Julie was the eternal runner-up. A girl with more talent and flair than a hundred Gigis, though lacking in Gigi’s single-minded focus, her stubborn, animal appetite for conquest.
    If simply winning her matches against Julie had been enough for Gigi Janeway, Roger would not be standing in the woods at that moment, aiming his deer rifle at the girl. But like her rapacious father, Gigi seemed to hunger for more than victory. Nothing less than total domination appeared to satisfy her. Every match against Julie was a blood-letting so vicious and so total that their accumulated effect was to drain the reservoirs of Julie’s very spirit. Between matches, each word Gigi spoke to Julie had a belittling purpose. Every act, each haughty look or whispered remark to a fellow player tormented Julie, mocked her, undermined her faith in her abilities and reminded her of her inferior station in Sand Hills, Florida, where her father was merely an unremarkable salesman.
    On too many nights, Julie lay in her sleepless bed and stared into her father’s eyes pleading for Roger to tell her what she might do to alter her fate.
    Roger had no answer. But he knew that Gigi Janeway and she alone blocked the way of his daughter. Her talent thwarted, skills obstructed, her very personality was being permanently stunted. No matter how hard she worked, no matter the peaks of athletic grace she reached, her efforts were forever mocked by Gigi Janeway. Just as his own career had been arrested by men like Gigi’s father who were willing to be moreaggressive, more relentlessly ruthless and hardnosed than Roger.
    Out on the glaring pavement of the used car lot Roger had known his own moments of artistic grace. Closing deals in half an hour with penny-pinching old fools from the beachfront condos. There were days when he’d summoned his silver tongue and not even the devil himself could have withstood his sales pitch. He held the single-day sales record of five used cars. However, he also held the record for the longest stretches without a sale. It was, Roger believed, all a function of the ebb and flow of the artistic temperament. But men like Arthur Janeway didn’t appreciate transcendent qualities. Janeway, like his daughter, was unapologetically cold-blooded, relying on his superior focus and his boundless stamina to wear down and eventually crush his competition. He got what he wanted by wanting it more than anyone