The stringing bench is the back third of a sporting-goods store, behind a curtain that used to be a shower curtain and is now just the curtain. Dev strings racquets on a machine older than he is: a drop-weight, a steel bar that swings down on a pivot and holds the tension by its own weight, which means it cannot lie. The electronic machines round off — they pull to a number, hold a second, let go, and call it done. The bar does not let go and it does not round. It hangs there at whatever the string will give until Dev clamps it. Gravity is the same on Tuesday as it was in 1991.
A racquet comes in with a note rubber-banded to the throat. The note says please string same as before. There is no number on it. The boy who dropped it off is fourteen and did not know the number; he said his grandfather always just brought it in, and the man behind the counter always just knew.
Dev turns the racquet over once, slow. The strings are blown at the center, frayed white where ten thousand forehands landed in the same square inch. The grip is worn through the leather to the bevel underneath, on the one side — the side a palm rides when a man holds the handle loose instead of choking it, which is how you hold it if you learned before the lessons got expensive. There is a chip at two o'clock on the frame where it kissed the court on a low volley, some year, and was sanded smooth and kept.
He doesn't need the number. He works the dead string out of the grommets and weighs the freed length across two fingers. Natural gut, not synthetic. And gut held at a low tension, because high tension saws gut apart from the inside and this set lasted long enough to go gray. A man who plays gut at fifty-eight is a man who wants the ball to stay on the strings a half-beat longer than it has to. Touch, not power. Dev knew three players like that and two of them are dead.
He clamps the frame in the machine. Threads the mains from the center out, both hands, the awl in his teeth between pulls. Sets the bar, watches it dip and steady, clamps, moves on. There is a rhythm to it that is not a count and not a clock; it is closer to the way you climb stairs in your own house at night without the light. The crosses go in over and under, over and under, and the frame, which arrived a little oval from the broken tension, pulls true again as the weave fills.
He could go a pound either way. Fifty-seven, fifty-nine. The boy would never feel it, and the boy is the one paying, and the boy is the one who will play with it. But the boy is not the one Dev is stringing for. He is stringing for the hand that wore the grip through to the bevel, the hand that is not coming in on Thursday to check, that cannot be disappointed and cannot be pleased — which is the whole reason the pound matters. Anyone will string it close enough for someone who's watching. The work is what you do for the one who isn't.
He ties off the last cross, burns the tail, trims it. Spins the racquet on his palm and it has weight in the head again, the right weight, the racquet being a racquet instead of a frame with a problem. He sets it by the curtain.
The boy comes Thursday after school. He doesn't have a court yet, doesn't even have a ball on him; he just wanted it back. He picks it up by the throat the way you carry a thing you don't know how to hold, and then his hand slides down to the grip and finds, without being told, the worn side — the palm settling loose onto the side his grandfather's palm wore smooth, because that is where the handle has decided to be held now, and the boy's hand simply goes where the wear is. He doesn't notice he did it. Dev does. Some things you don't teach. They get handed down through the leather.
The bar is already down for the next one.