She stopped the bike.
"You keep your elbow down like that on the return," he said, "you'll be swatting flies all summer."
Dee stared at him. He cracked another peanut.
"You were at Washington Street?"
"I go by there most mornings. On my way to church." He nodded at the paper sack. "Peanuts for the pigeons. Only the pigeons never get any." He ate one. "That big boy's got a good serve. Better than Langford's, flat. But Langford's got a better kick on his second ball, and he gets in faster behind it. You ever see him hit an overhead with the sun in his eyes?"
"No, sir."
"He can't." He folded the top of the sack down, very precisely, into three folds. "Court One's the only court at that club laid out east and west, so the members on the veranda can see it. Fool way to build a court. Come four o'clock, the sun's sitting right on top of the clubhouse roof. Whoever's on the east end is looking straight up into it." He stood, slowly, with a hand on his knee. "Something to think about."
He started to walk off. Dee got off the bike.
"Mr. Grant."
He turned back.
"How do you know all that?"
He looked at her for a while. He had a long, careful face, the face of a man who has spent most of his life choosing what to show and what to keep.
"I've shined that boy's shoes since he was nine years old," he said. "You learn a lot about a man from his shoes. Where he wears them down." He tipped his head toward her racket, bungeed to the bike rack. "And I restrung that, once. Long time ago. Before you had it."
"You what?"
But he had already turned the corner onto Bay Street, walking at the same unhurried pace, a thin man in a white shirt in the heat, and when she got to the corner and looked, he was gone.