At 7:20 a woman came through the gate pulling a wire basket on wheels, the kind people use to carry laundry to a laundromat, except that this one was full of tennis balls, maybe a hundred and fifty of them, all of them faded to the color of weak lemonade. She was small and brown and seventy-one years old, and she wore a white visor and a gray sweatshirt that said ST. ELIZABETH EMERGENCY DEPT 5K 2009, and she walked like someone whose knees had opinions.
"You're early," Perpetua Ancheta said.
"You're early."
"I'm always early. I'm old. Old people are always early. It's how we prove we're not dead." She parked the basket by the board and looked at it with her hands on her hips, the way she looked at it every morning, as if she were the board's mother and she wanted to see what kind of trouble it had gotten into overnight. Then she took the rag off its hook and wiped the corner of a rectangle on Court 2 where somebody had drawn something rude the night before, and she put the rag back. That was allowed. Perpetua had written to the parks department in 2019 and gotten a letter back saying she could act as volunteer board steward, and she had laminated the letter and kept it in her basket in a zip bag, and the rule about not erasing what you did not write did not apply to obscenity, according to Perpetua, because obscenity was not writing, it was weather.
"Eight o'clock," she read. "R. Abara. Very official. You want to hit before?"
"If you want."
"I always want. I'm seventy-one. I have nothing else to want." She wheeled the basket through the gate onto Court 3, which was empty and would stay empty until a group of four retired men called the Breakfast Club showed up at nine, and she started taking balls out and putting them in the pockets of a canvas apron she tied around her waist. "Get on the other side. Forehands. I want to see the thing we talked about."
The thing they had talked about was his follow-through. He had a habit of stopping the racket too early, as though he were embarrassed by where it wanted to go. Perpetua said it made him look like a man pointing at something and then deciding not to.
They had been doing this for a year and a half. Before that, Perpetua had played doubles every morning with a woman named Benedetta Ruiz, who had been her friend for forty years and who had died in the spring of last year in her sleep, between a Thursday and a Friday, with her tennis shoes already set out by her bedroom door. For a month after, Perpetua had come to the park every morning anyway, at seven, and sat on the bench by Court 3 with her basket and had not hit a single ball. Ruel had seen her there four Saturdays in a row. On the fifth Saturday he had walked over with his racket and his three balls and asked her if she was waiting for somebody, and she had looked at him for a long time and said yes, but she's not coming, and then she had stood up and said, all right, get on the other side.
He did not know then that she had been a nurse in an emergency room for thirty-four years, or that she had played Number One singles for a small Catholic college in Manila before she came to America in 1976, or that her husband had been a pharmacist who died in 2003, or that her son lived in Phoenix and called on Sundays. He learned all of that later, in pieces, between points. What he knew that first morning was that she hit the ball flat and low and very hard for a person her size, and that she yelled at him in two languages, and that when he finally hit a backhand that went where he meant it to go she said "There," very quietly, the way you would say it to a child who had finally let go of the side of the pool.
Now she fed him forehands from the basket, one after another, with an easy underhand motion, and he hit them back, and she said "No," and "No," and "Better," and "No, you're doing it again, you're apologizing to the ball," and "There."
At 7:40 a white Lexus SUV pulled into the gravel lot beside the courts, and four men got out of it carrying tennis bags that cost more than Ruel's grandmother's monthly electric bill. Ruel knew three of them by sight. He knew the fourth one by name, because everybody at Wick Park knew him by name, because he made sure of it.