"Nobody," he admitted.
"So hit like it."
He hit like it. Or tried. The thing about follow-through, Perpetua had told him once, was that you could not think your way into it. You could only stop thinking your way out of it. The racket wanted to go up and over your shoulder; it was your fear that stopped it at your hip. Your fear thought that if you let the racket finish, the ball would go too far, and everyone would see. So you held back, and the ball went into the net, and everyone saw that instead.
He let the racket finish. The ball went deep, into the corner, and kicked up off the line in a little puff of the gray dust that collected on the edges of the court in fall, and Perpetua, who was seventy-one and whose knees had opinions, ran three steps and got her racket on it and sent it back crosscourt, and he ran and let the racket finish again, and they had a rally, a real one, eleven balls, the longest they had had in weeks, until she hit a drop shot that he did not even try for because he knew she had been saving it.
"There," she said.
At 8:55 Ferrol got out of the car. He did not come through the gate. He stood by the board with his hands in the pockets of his uniform jacket, and he read it. All of it. Ruel could see him from the baseline, reading the rules strip along the bottom, the hours, the four columns, the names. He read the youth hold strip for a long time. Then he took a phone out, and Ruel thought he was going to photograph it, but instead he just held the phone and looked at the board some more and then put the phone away.
A small green Corolla came down Sumac too fast and swung into the gravel lot and stopped crooked across two spaces, and Benedetta Abara got out of it in her laundry smock and her good coat over it, a woman built square and solid like a mailbox, with gray hair cut very short and reading glasses on a beaded chain around her neck. She did not look at the courts. She did not look at her grandson. She walked straight across the gravel to the board and stopped three feet from the police officer and put her glasses on.
Ruel stopped playing. Perpetua stopped too. They both came to the gate.
"You're F-217," Benedetta said.
Ferrol turned. He looked at her laundry smock, at the Merriam General badge clipped to it, at her face. "I was. They renumbered in '16. I'm 4471 now."
"Mm." She looked him up and down over the top of her glasses. "My son Chidi went to your desk. Summer of 2011. He was twelve. He was skinny and he had glasses like mine and he talked too much."