Rolf Cheever was sixty or so, tall and tan in October, with a white quarter-zip pullover and the kind of thick gray hair that looked like it had been designed for him by a committee. He lived in one of the big houses on the ridge above the park, the ones with glass walls facing the creek, and he had been coming to Wick Park for three years, ever since the private club across the river had raised its dues. He had been on the parks advisory committee for two. He organized a doubles group that played on Courts 4 and 3 on Saturday mornings, and he had spent most of the past year telling anyone who would stand still that the board was a disgrace and an embarrassment and a relic and that the city should replace it with an app, like every other city in America, where you booked your court online with a credit card for a five-dollar fee that would go toward resurfacing.
Perpetua thought the app was a terrible idea. She had said so at three committee meetings. She had said that half the people who played at Wick Park did not have credit cards they wanted to put on file with the city, and that some of them did not have smartphones, and that the board was the only thing in the city that treated a retired bus driver and a man with a house on the ridge exactly the same, which was to say, first come, first served, write your name in chalk. At the last meeting, in September, Rolf Cheever had stood up after her and said, very pleasantly, that he appreciated Mrs. Ancheta's nostalgia, but that the board was routinely abused, that people wrote names for friends who never showed up, that slots were stolen and erased, and that frankly there were people using these courts who were not from the neighborhood and did not respect it, and an app would solve that, because an app would know who you were.
Perpetua had told Ruel about that meeting the following Saturday. She had told it flatly, without commentary, and then she had fed him thirty backhands in a row and not said a word about his follow-through, which was how he knew she was angry.
The four men stood at the board for a while. Ruel watched them out of the corner of his eye while he hit. He saw Cheever point at the Court 4 column. He saw one of the other men shrug. He saw Cheever take the rag off its hook.
"Mrs. Ancheta," Ruel said.
"I see it," Perpetua said. She did not stop feeding. "Hit the ball."
He hit the ball. It went into the net.
"Hit the ball like you mean it."
When he looked again, the four men were walking through the gate onto Court 4. They set their bags down on the bench by the net post. One of them started stretching his calves against the fence. Cheever took out a new can of balls and popped it open and the sound carried all the way across the empty courts like a gunshot in a cartoon.
The clock on Ruel's phone said 7:46.
Perpetua stopped feeding. She put the last ball in her hand back in her apron pocket. She walked to the gate between Court 3 and the board, and she stood in front of the board for about five seconds, and then she turned around and looked at Ruel, and he walked over and stood beside her and looked too.
In the Court 4 column, beside the painted 8, his name was gone. There was a gray smear where the rag had gone over it, and over the smear, in white chalk, in a big confident slanting hand, someone had written CHEEVER + 3.