"Ruel. Ruel Abara."
"Ruel." Ferrol put his hat back on. He did not do it quickly. "I'm sorry. I came in here with my mind made up. I had a guy on the phone telling me there's a problem and I looked across this lot and I decided which one of you was the problem before I got out of the car. That's on me. That's not on you."
Ruel did not know what to say. He had never been apologized to by a police officer. He had imagined, sometimes, late at night, what he would say if it ever happened, and in his imagination he had always said something cool and devastating, something that would make the officer feel very small. Now that it was happening, he found that he did not want anyone to feel small. He just wanted his court.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay," Ferrol said. Then he turned around and walked through the gate onto Court 4.
Cheever met him at the service line. He had his racket under his arm and his phone in his hand, and he had the expression of a man who has watched a meeting go sideways and is already composing the email about it.
"Officer, I'm not sure what she told you, but—"
"She showed me the board," Ferrol said.
"The board's a mess. That's my whole point. That's what I've been telling the committee for a year. You can't run a public facility on chalk. People write over each other, people wipe each other, it's chaos—"
"Did you wipe his name?"
Cheever opened his mouth. Ruel, standing by the gate, saw it happen: the little hitch, the half second where a man decides between the true sentence and the convenient one. It was the same half second Ruel had watched his own mother live inside of for most of his childhood, before she moved to Atlanta and left him with his grandmother, and he had learned to read it the way a sailor reads a sky.
"There was a smudge," Cheever said. "I cleaned the smudge."