The text came in at 7:15 on a Thursday night. Hey. Please do me a favor and play tomorrow. No charge. I hate 5 players. Messes up the drills. Pleeeeeeze.

I’d told him a few weeks earlier that I was cutting back. Tennis had been my thing for years. I liked the people. I liked him. I’d driven him to a cataract surgery once, sat in the waiting room like it was nothing. We had a rhythm on the court, the kind that builds up over enough Saturdays that you stop thinking about it.

The divorce didn’t leave room for it. French lessons went first. I’m still doing Duolingo, which keeps something alive even if it’s not the same as sitting across from a real person working through conversation. Guitar lessons went too, mine, not his. His stayed. That wasn’t a hard call.

I told him all of it, in the vague way you tell people things. Divorce. Single dad. Cutting back on extras. He knew enough.

Now he needed a body for the clinic. He wasn’t asking as a coach drumming up business. He was asking as a friend doing me a favor by asking me for one.

I said yes. Then spent the next ten minutes trying to figure out what I owed him for it.

Not owed literally. He’d said no charge, clear enough. But I’ve never been good at being on the receiving end of anything. I like being the one who helps. Being helped feels closer to being seen for what I actually am right now. There’s a kind of pride that has nothing to do with tennis and everything to do with not wanting anyone to watch you count.

I thought about paying him anyway, quietly, after. I thought about what else I could do for him instead. Any way to turn a gift into a transaction so I wouldn’t have to just take it.

My son doesn’t ask for help either. I don’t know what that costs him, or if it costs him anything at all. But I know the version of this I want for him is different from mine. Not just accepting help when it’s offered, but accepting a gift without needing to earn it back first. Being grateful without the guilt attached. I don’t know how to show him that when I can’t manage it myself.

I played the clinic anyway. For most of it I wasn’t thinking about my strokes. I was thinking that every mistake was going to be the thing that made him regret asking. Miss an easy volley, and some part of my brain said, there it is, now he wishes he hadn’t. I didn’t let it show. But it sat there under the whole hour and a half, a low hum of trying to be worth a favor I was already being given for free.

I still haven’t figured out what to do with the gratitude. I haven’t paid him. I haven’t found the thing to do instead. I said thank you and drove home, still turning it over, this specific discomfort of being handed something I can’t hand back.