At Eastbank the next Wednesday, a man named Phil told Mara he was too old to learn a backhand.
“How old?”
“Fifty-four.”
“Oh, well.” She caught a ball on her strings. “You should have come last Tuesday.”
His wife laughed so hard he looked injured. Denise, leaning against the gate with two travel mugs, smiled into the one that was hers.
Mara fed Phil a slow ball. He opened the face of his racket and sent it almost vertically into the fence.
“Again,” she said. “Leave your hand where it is.”
“Should I change the grip?”
“No.”
He changed the grip.
She went around the net, took his racket, and put it back into his hand. He had an expensive sports watch and a piece of white tissue stuck to his chin. Before the lesson he had asked about Tess, and then his wife had asked about something else so abruptly Mara wanted to thank her.
“This part here.” Mara touched the heel of his hand. “That's fine. Don't fiddle with it.”
She dropped a ball from just in front of him. Phil hit it over the net.
“Well, shit,” he said.
“There you go.”
He did it seven times before he remembered to be unable. His wife applauded every one. At the end he wanted to book another lesson, and Mara had to point him toward Denise.
“You're not staying?” he asked.
“We're working on her,” Denise said.
Mara collected the balls. The courts had been resurfaced since she was last there; the blue was still deep where the sun didn't reach. Behind court six, the same split sycamore leaned over the parking lot. Tess used to hit balls up into its branches and shake the trunk to get them down, believing in the possibility long after Mara had explained the size of the tree.
Denise handed her the other mug.
“I put milk in.”
“Thank you.”
“I've got the actual numbers inside.”
In the office, a printer sat on a cardboard box labeled PRINTER STAND. Denise moved a stack of forms off the visitor's chair. She had run Eastbank for eleven years and still referred to the leaking roof over the locker rooms as the previous management's roof.
“Twenty-four teaching hours. The rest is program work, scheduling, a bit of staff supervision. Salary, health contribution. Paid vacation. Not whenever you like, but actual vacation.”
Mara read the sheet. It was respectable money. More than she had made in some years with Tess, when she had paid herself last and called it a system.
“You'd have Saturdays in the fall,” Denise said. “We rotate Sundays. I need the evening adults to feel like we mean it this time.”
“Phil will come back.”
“Phil's bought eleven rackets in two years. Phil was always coming back. I want his wife to come back.”
Mara looked up.
“She was good,” Denise said. “You saw her. Every time you walked over to him, she started hitting without apologizing.”
Mara had seen. She had put the woman farther from the net, where she could take a full swing. Her name was Claudia. Mara had almost forgotten to use it.
“I'd like to make a proper adult program,” Denise said. “People stick around for coffee. They play matches that don't ruin their marriages. The juniors too, obviously. But I don't need you to find me a prodigy.”
“You make it sound terrible.”
“Does it?”
Mara took a drink. The coffee was too hot, and she held it in her mouth for a second before swallowing.
“No,” she said.
Denise slid the paper across. “I need to know by Monday. I'm talking to one other person. I'd rather have you.”
Mara folded it once and put it in her bag, in the pocket where the tournament credentials usually went.
Owen was waiting outside in his truck. She had forgotten he was meeting her until she saw him lifting one arm out of the window. He was wearing work pants and a polo shirt that had come from a promotion at the bus depot; the little embroidered bus sat on his chest like an animal looking for somewhere to hide.
“How'd it go?” he asked.
“Fine. I think I taught a man to hit a backhand.”
“One?”
“A whole one.”
He grinned. In the back of the truck was a plastic bin she recognized. They had agreed he would bring it, weeks ago, before Merritt. Her old photo albums and some kitchen things from his attic. His wife wanted to insulate the room above the garage, which apparently meant emptying it first.
“I can't take that in my car,” Mara said.
“I know. Thought I'd drop it after lunch. You said you'd be home.”
“I'm going to Tess's.”
“Leave it by your door?”
She nodded. They drove separately to a diner near the club. Owen ordered a sandwich and then changed it when the waitress told him what the soup was. He liked soup more than she remembered. He had started wearing glasses to read the menu. The first pair was wrong; he dug in the neck of his shirt for another.
“Those look the same,” Mara said.
“They're not.”
He let her try them. The room blurred. She took them off and returned them with a small involuntary shake of her head.
“Tess said you hurt yourself during the match.”
“Sofa injury. Occupational hazard.”
Mara laughed. She unfolded her napkin, then found herself telling him about the backhand Tess had hit on match point, as if he hadn't seen it. He let her finish. When the soup arrived, he moved his phone away from the bowl.
“I didn't know what to do afterward,” she said.
He held the spoon above the soup. “About what?”
“You know about what.”
“I know she said she was finished.”
“In front of everybody.”
Owen lowered the spoon. He looked tired. It was easy to forget that he had been up since four, that the whole rest of his life happened before she thought to call him.
“She told you that morning, didn't she?”
“I didn't say she didn't.”
“I'm not saying you said it.”
They sat while he ate two spoonfuls of soup. He tore the packet off a set of crackers and crumbled them in. Mara used to hate the sound. She found she still did, a little.
“Did you ever fix the rattle in your car?” he asked.
She stared at him, then gave a laugh that surprised her. “No.”
“I'll hear it before I leave. Probably just that heat shield. You keep going back down that washboard road to the courts.”
“It isn't a washboard road.”
“It is if you do forty.”
They talked about the car. He had an hour before he had to be home to let an electrician in. Mara had known him when home meant where she was. She finished her sandwich and didn't ask him to keep listening.
*
Tess had bought a table.
Mara discovered it by walking into the end of it with her hip. It was larger than the old one and stood farther out into the passage from the kitchen. There were two chairs of one kind and two of another. A strip of paper with measurements on it lay beneath a bowl of peaches.
“Sorry,” Tess said. “I keep doing that too.”
Mara rubbed her hip. “It's nice.”
“April found it.”
“It's very big.”
“For having people.” Tess took two glasses from the cupboard. “Do you want something? I've got water or water with bubbles that's gone flat.”
“Water.”
From the living room came the whine of a power drill, followed by a hard clatter.
“Don't come in,” April called.
Tess went in. Mara followed with the glasses. April was sitting on the floor between two upright boards, holding a small metal cylinder in her palm.
“It disappeared,” she said.
“It's in your hand.”
“This is its friend.”
One half of the shelves stood by the wall. The other lay in pieces on the rug. April wore her hair tied in a ragged knot and had a pencil behind each ear. She removed one, tested the point against her finger, and put it back.
“Hi, Mara.”
“Hello, sweetheart.”
April turned to Tess. “I've got to leave in twenty minutes. We can get it upright. Don't put anything in it till I come back.”
“That's basically shelves.”
“For someone without books.”
Mara put the glasses down and knelt to help. Tess and April lifted the second side. Mara saw the missing fitting under the rug fringe and passed it over. For ten minutes they were occupied with keeping the boards together. The inside of Mara's knee ached against the floor. At fifty she could feed balls for hours but could no longer kneel on a piece of instruction paper and expect it to provide cushioning.
Tess held the back panel in place while April drove the screws. She had a little scrape beside her elbow. Mara wanted to ask whether Hana had started with the return. The words gathered and she pressed her palm more firmly against the wood.
When they got the shelves upright, they leaned left. All three stood considering them.
“Floor,” April said.
“Definitely,” Tess said.
Mara crouched, folded a scrap of cardboard, and slid it under the left corner. The shelves straightened.
“Your mother's hired,” April said.
Tess went to get a plate for the peaches. They ate them standing up because the table was covered with screws. April left with both pencils still behind her ears, promising to return before the books staged an assault. Tess watched her car through the window.
“She's doing sound for that outdoor thing this weekend. The one with the puppets.”
Mara remembered to ask which thing.
Tess tried to explain the puppets. They were enormous, apparently. One needed three people to operate the head. She found a picture on her phone and handed it over, laughing before Mara had seen it.
Mara's own phone vibrated. An unfamiliar number, with a message beneath it.
Mara. Inez Rios. Could you call me? Work question.
For a moment the puppet on Tess's screen seemed unintelligible. It had long arms and a red mouth.
“Do you get inside?” Mara asked.
“What?”
“The puppet.”
“No. I just said. There are poles.”
“Right.” Mara handed the phone back.
She stayed another twenty minutes. Tess offered to make dinner, but Mara said she had something thawing, though she hadn't taken anything out. In the car she waited until the front door had shut before she called the number.