Court Three, Hollis Park

The public courts at Hollis Park cost eight dollars an hour and have a crack across court three that runs from the service line to the back fence like a river on a map. My brother Tom and I have played on court three every other Sunday since 2004. We ask for it. When it's taken, we wait. The crack matters. A ball that lands on it does something. Not much. A skip, a little sideways kick. Over twenty-one years we have both learned exactly where it is and exactly how to hit it, and we both pretend it's luck. He's two years older. He taught me, back when it was a kid teaching a smaller kid on a driveway with a garage door for a net. That's on the record. What's also on the record, in a notebook I keep in the glove compartment, is every set we've played since we were twenty-four and twenty-six and decided this was a thing. Two hundred and eleven to two hundred and nine. I'm not going to tell you which way round. He knows. I know. Our wives know and have agreed never to bring it up at dinner. Our mother, who is eighty-one, thinks we play "for the exercise," and we let her. The way it goes: we warm up for ten minutes without talking. Then we spin the racket. Then we play a set, and whoever loses buys the coffee after, and during the coffee we talk about everything except the set. His kids. My divorce, when that was going on. Dad, when Dad was dying, which was a long spring of Sundays where we'd play and neither of us was really there and we'd sit with the coffee and say nothing for forty minutes, and then go, and it was the best part of the week. He's a pusher. I want that noted. He gets everything back, he hits it high and deep and safe, and he waits for you to lose your patience, which I do, every time, somewhere around 3-3. I hit the ball harder than him. Always have. I hit it harder and I hit it out, and he stands there with that face.

Last Sunday. He's fifty-three now, I'm fifty-one. It was cold. The crack has gotten wider and someone's put a strip of green tape over it that lasted one winter and is now just a different colored crack. I was serving at 5-4, 40-30. Set point. The count, whichever way it goes, was one from being tied or two clear, and we both knew it, and I could see him at the baseline doing the bounce he does. I hit the serve fine. He got it back. Of course he got it back, high and deep, and I hit a forehand crosscourt that I hit well, I hit it properly, and he ran it down and put it back on the crack. It kicked. Sideways, off my frame, into the fence. Deuce. I want to say I said something. I didn't. I looked at him and he looked at me with that face, the one that says "lucky" and doesn't mean it, and I lost the next two points because I was thinking about the crack instead of the ball, and then I lost the set 7-5 because I'm me. Two hundred and eleven to two hundred and ten. Or two hundred and twelve to two hundred and nine. Either way. At the coffee place he got the coffees, because I'd lost, and he sat down and said, "The crack." "The crack." "I aimed at it." "I know you did." "Twenty-one years I've been aiming at it." "I know." He drank his coffee. "You'd have done the same." I didn't answer that because he was right and there's no point. Then he said, "Mom's birthday. Are we doing the thing," and we talked about the thing, and about his eldest getting married, and about how the park's talking about resurfacing the courts in the spring, which would mean the crack, and we both went quiet at that. "They won't," he said. "They might." "Eight dollars an hour. They're not resurfacing anything." Two weeks from now, court three, ten a.m. I've been practicing my serve. He doesn't know that. I'm fifty-one and I've been going to the wall at the school on Tuesdays and hitting serves at a chalk mark, like a kid. Two hundred and twelve. That's all I'll say.