"I don't know," Ferrol said, and it sounded like the truest thing Ruel had ever heard him say. "I lost track. I'm going to try to find out."
He pushed the clipboard across the table and held out the pen on its string. The girl looked at it. Then she took the pen and wrote her name, carefully, in letters that went uphill, and her age, 12, and pushed it back.
Ferrol read it. "Okay, Yuliana. Court 4 is held for you and him till ten. That's what the board says. Anybody tells you different, you send them to me."
"What if you're not here?"
It was a fair question. Ruel saw it land. He saw Ferrol look at the boarded building, and the board with its soft green corners, and the gravel lot where the white Lexus had slowed and gone on, and the calendar in his head that had January on it, and a schedule he did not control, and a city that did not pay anybody to stand here at noon.
"I'm off most Saturdays," he said. "Most."
The girl considered this.
"Then you send them to the board," Ferrol said. "It's in paint. Read it to them out loud."
Yuliana nodded as though that were a reasonable plan. Then she walked through the gate onto Court 4 holding Tito's racket out in front of her like a lantern, and Ruel went after her to show her where to stand, and behind him he heard Perpetua start to laugh about something, and Ferrol pour another cup of coffee, and down on Sumac, faint, a car he could not see slowing, or maybe not slowing, maybe just going by.
He did not turn around to look. He showed Yuliana how to hold the racket, the way Perpetua had shown him, and he dropped a ball in front of her and told her to swing and not to stop, to let it finish, to let it go wherever it wanted to go. She swung. She missed. She swung again.
On the board by the gate, in the low sun, his name sat yellow in its square, and hers was not on it yet. There was room.