The Saturday after that was cold for real, the first frost, and the sycamores along the fence had given up almost everything. Ruel got to the park at 6:51. He meant to sit on the bench and retie his shoes and wait for seven like he always did.
There was a folding table beside the board.
It was a cheap one, the kind with a plastic top and legs that fold out from underneath, and it was set up on the gravel just to the left of the gate, slightly crooked, because the ground there was uneven. On it was a thermos, a clipboard with a pen tied to it with string, and a cardboard box that had once held a case of motor oil. In the box were rackets. A lot of them. Old aluminum frames and older wood ones and a few graphite ones from the early 2000s with faded paint jobs, Prince and Head and Wilson and a couple of brands Ruel had never heard of, all of them with brand-new strings, white and tight and bright as fishing line, the cut ends still sharp.
Taped to the front of the table, on a piece of poster board, in red paint, in capital letters that were a little shaky, it said: DESK.
There was no one sitting at it. There was a folding chair behind it, empty.
Ruel stood there for a long time. His breath went up white. He looked at the rec building, which was still boarded, and at the gravel lot, which was empty except for one vehicle he did not recognize, a gray pickup truck with a fishing-rod rack on the back window, and then he saw that the driver's door was open and a man was sitting sideways on the seat with his feet on the gravel, holding a cup of coffee and looking at his phone.
Ferrol looked up.
He did not get up right away. He finished whatever he was reading and put the phone in his jacket pocket and stood, and stretched his bad shoulder, and walked over. He was not in uniform. He was wearing the Clippers sweatshirt and sweatpants and old court shoes with a hole in the left toe.
"You're early," he said.
"So are you."
"I was going to be sitting at it. I got cold." He looked at the table as though it belonged to someone else and he was not sure what they had been thinking. "I restrung them. It took me three weekends. There's a guy at the sporting goods store on Route 9, he let me use his machine after hours if I bought the string. I bought a lot of string." He picked up the clipboard and looked at it. It was blank except for a line at the top: SAT YOUTH. NAME. AGE. "I don't know if anybody's going to come. I put a flyer up at the east side library. And the Boys and Girls Club. I don't know if anybody reads flyers anymore."