"You told him you won't referee chalk." She was already walking. She walked the way she walked to the net when she smelled a short ball, without any hesitation at all, like a door swinging shut. "Good. Don't referee chalk. Read paint."
Ferrol looked at Ruel. Ruel did not know what his own face was doing. Ferrol looked at the four men on Court 4, who had stopped hitting and were watching. Then he sighed through his nose, a long tired sigh, the sigh of a man who has been on shift since eleven and has just been told by a seventy-one-year-old woman in a 5K sweatshirt to follow her, and he followed her.
Ruel followed too, a few steps behind. Nobody told him not to.
They stood in front of the board. The sun had come up over the ridge now, and it lay across the green plywood at a low slant, so that every brush mark and every chip and every old nail hole showed like the surface of the moon.
"First," Perpetua said. "Look at the 8 on Court 4. Not at the name. Under it."
Ferrol looked. Ruel looked too.
The chalkboard paint on the Court 4 rectangles was newer than the rest. Perpetua had repainted it herself in June, because the old paint had worn through to the wood, and she had used a can of chalkboard paint from the hardware store on Canal that turned out to be the cheap kind, the kind that held onto chalk like a grudge. The rag had gone over the name. It had smeared it. But in the low sun, at that angle, under the big white slanting letters of CHEEVER + 3, you could see it plainly, a ghost in yellow, square capitals: R. ABARA.
"Yellow chalk," Perpetua said. "There's only yellow and white in the can. He used yellow. Mr. Cheever used white. You can see the yellow under the white. You can't write under something. You can only write over it."
Ferrol said nothing. He leaned in a little closer.
"Second," Perpetua said. "Look at the 9."
CHEEVER + 3. And a ditto mark.
"One hour per name per day," she said, and pointed to the painted strip along the bottom, without looking at it, the way you point to a clock in your own kitchen. "He took two. That's not a dispute. That's just the rule. That's not my opinion. It's in paint. It's been in paint since 1988."