“I do know that!” Alice insisted. “You just get kinda intense sometimes with that stuff, and he’ll pick up on that whether you direct it at him or not. You have to tone it down a little around the kids or they’re gonna think all you care about is tennis.”

I nodded, thinking about this. “Yeah, I guess I can get a little into it sometimes. Should I stop watching it when they’re around?”

“Of course not. You can like whatever you want to like, just try and vary it a little or something,” she said with a halfhearted shrug.

“Are you calling me boring?” I asked her, teasing now since the brunt of the argument seemed to be over.

“No, just…focused. Which isn’t a bad thing, I just don’t want the kids thinking they need to be tennis players to get your approval.” After saying this she hugged me and didn’t let go until Kallie came into the kitchen and politely asked us to change the channel, since the cartoons she liked were over.

It was difficult not to get too involved with matches on TV with the kids around, but I tried to hold it down, even when they were with me at the youth center and I was giving lessons to the other kids. I guess deep in my heart of hearts I was hoping that Charlie might take and interest in the game and want to play, but from the day I accidentally knocked him into the pool all he wanted to do was swim. Still, I kept taking him to the youth center’s tennis courts with me on Saturdays throughout his childhood. As he got older he’d hit a few balls back and forth with me, and although I knew it wasn’t his favorite thing in the world I loved those mornings more than I can express.

Kallie never got into tennis either, but to be honest I wasn’t too surprised. I’d never figured her for an athlete. That might sound horrible but I don’t mean it in a bad way at all, she simply didn’t seem very interested in sports in general. When Charlie was really young Alice got them both involved in swimming lessons, but Kallie seemed to have much more fun playing with the other kids than she did with any of the lessons themselves. It was fine, though. We figured that as long as she was having fun there was no reason to care.