She sat down. There was applause, which Mrs. Bettencourt asked people to hold.
Laszlo Ruhland got up next and said, in about forty seconds, that he had been in the group that morning, that he had seen the name, that he was ashamed he hadn't said something sooner, and that he would rather play on a cracked court with an honest board than a perfect court with a dishonest app. He sat down red-faced. A Breakfast Club man said the app was a good idea and the board was always a hassle. The mixed-doubles woman said she worked nights and could not reserve anything online at seven in the morning the way the app's release schedule would require. A man nobody knew said the whole thing was a waste of taxpayer money and they should sell the courts to a developer.
Then a man stood up from the back row, near the door, where Ruel had not noticed him, because he was not in uniform. He was wearing jeans and a Columbus Clippers sweatshirt and a baseball cap, and he took the cap off as he walked down the aisle, and Ruel's stomach turned over once.
"Sonny Ferrol," he said at the microphone. "Merriam PD. I'm here on my own time. I'm not speaking for the department. I'm speaking as the guy whose badge number is on that board." He did not have notes. He held the cap in both hands the way he had held it at the board. "I wrote the incident report Mr. Cheever's talking about. It's public. I'd encourage everybody to read it. Short version, I got the call, I got there, and I treated the wrong person like the problem. A seventy-one-year-old lady had to walk me over to a piece of plywood and make me read my own handwriting before I saw what was right in front of me. That's not the board's fault. That's mine." He paused. "I don't have an opinion on apps. I'm not on the committee. I'll just say this. When I painted that sign, the idea was that a kid could come down to the park and not have to argue with an adult to get what was already his. The point wasn't the paint. The point was somebody sitting at the desk. If the city wants to fix something, that's the thing that's broke."
He put the cap back on and walked back up the aisle and sat down in the back row again, and did not look at anyone.
The committee voted, at 9:14 p.m., to table the app proposal until January, pending a study of what Mrs. Bettencourt called "hybrid options." Rolf Cheever voted against tabling. So did two others. It passed eight to three. The man from the paper wrote something in his notebook and left. In the hallway afterward, Cheever walked past Ruel and Perpetua and Benedetta without looking at them, talking on his phone, and Ruel heard him say "January's fine, we'll have the numbers by January," and understood that nothing was over, that it had simply moved to a later square on the calendar.
Ferrol was gone by the time they got to the parking lot.
"Is that a win?" Ruel asked in the car.
"It's a not-lose," said Perpetua, who was riding in the back seat of the Corolla because Benedetta would not hear of her taking the bus. "At my age, I'll take it."
"In January he'll have numbers."
"In January," Benedetta said from the driver's seat, "we'll have numbers too." She did not explain what she meant. She drove the rest of the way in silence, and when she dropped Perpetua off at her apartment on Ashgrove, she got out and walked her to the door, and the two of them stood under the porch light for a while talking about something Ruel could not hear, two women in good coats, one tall and square, one small and bent, nodding.