Chapter 5
Interstate Bowl is, in a word, busy.
In a series of words, it’s full to the gunwales of polyester shorts and replete with the scent of nacho cheese dip and tobacco.
James, one of the many high school employees tasked with keeping up with obsessed middle-aged league members who have decidedly
made rolling heavy balls down a glossy surface a major part of their identity, is covered in a cloud of bowling shoe disinfectant
beside the jukebox, which is beside the cheap food bar flanked by splitting red-cushioned stools.
I plop my shoes on the floor next to Gloria and sit down.
“He loves you.” Gloria casts her gaze over at Jack, who’s leaning against the bar.
I shake my head. “He dates more women than are in this building.”
“What women? Look around.” Gloria takes in the swaths of males around us. Fair. “And dated . Past tense being the key tense here. I think he’s waiting for you.”
“For what?” I throw out, giving a disbelieving laugh. “I’m right here.”
“Have you forgotten Parker so easily?”
My face warms slightly, internally slapped by surprise at the remark. Of course. Parker. Only the guy I’ve been dating across
the world. For two-plus years.
“ Jack loves you.”
“He’s paid to love me, nothing more.” I lace up my bowling shoes. They are a smidge too big, given they were a graduating gift to me last year from a teammate and, you guessed it, former student. Actually three whole lanes are made up almost entirely of former and current students.
My idea for the Wednesday Night Hangout came three years ago on a whim. Partly because I knew it’d be good to help them practice
their English outside of the classroom and partly because they became friends.
I missed the students when they graduated the class, and they missed me.
Hence, a hangout.
And what started as a social outlet for students in the middle of a cold, dark winter turned quickly into a weekly gathering,
which turned quickly into a league. Or rather, a set of leagues. Enough students, both past and present, came to fill up six
teams. And before we knew it, we were the Pin Pals.
Which, naturally, Jack resents.
“You actually think that your agent would haul that stupid bowling ball you got him last Christmas on a train forty-five minutes
out of the city, put on that T-shirt jersey he complains about to us every week, and throw such pathetic balls that you had to appeal to the team to keep him—which of course everyone did because it’s you— because he’s paid to? He’s not your bodyguard, Bryony. He’s not paid to stick around.”
“Of course he’s not. He sticks around because my brain and hands are now precious cargo to Amelia and the agency, and as such,
part of his job is to secretly make sure I don’t go off and ruin everything by becoming an alcoholic or falling in love with
a billionaire on a remote island or losing one of my typing hands in a freak bowling accident. Or who knows?” I stand up.
“Maybe he’s afraid that if I’m left alone too long, I’ll leak everything to the press.”
Gloria inhales furiously through her nostrils. As she does every time we have this conversation and I refuse to give in.
“But really,” I say, smiling, “we all know it’s because bowling night with my students is reality television on steroids,
and he comes for the drama.”
I wiggle between people up to the screen and, before tapping in our names, check the opposing team. Their name is the Striking Pencils. (It was Spitting Vipers, but Lakshmi has a fairly terrifying backstory and now understandable phobia of all things snake, so the team generously switched it to what they called truly intimidating in light of their current lives: English academia.) They’re out Lakshmi and Phuong tonight, but I see already on their two screens Galina, Chen, Miho, Saliha, Abiola, and Abiola’s first wife, Tiwa, as well as Abiola’s second wife he pretends is his sister (don’t get me started), Ayo. Plus Jose.
The next two lanes over are covered up as well.
It’s a full house tonight.
I type in Abdallah. Socorro. Gloria. Fatima (a sweet fifty-five-year-old woman who has lived in America for over twenty-five years and is only now brave enough to seek
English classes). Otieno. Eman. Then I move to the next lane and type in Mr. and Mrs. Azarenka (our elderly and slightly terrifying
Moldovan couple who refuse for propriety’s sake to be called by their first names) . Jack. Me. And the ever-quirky but not-totally-unhandsome newest member to our group, the twenty-five-year-old German student,
Albrecht.
He sits next to Gloria, frowning deeply as he watches her reaching for a nacho from the center of the booth. Not going to
lie, this happens a lot. He’s the resident Gloria starer.
Abruptly, she turns to him, nacho in hand. “ What , Albrecht? What is it now?”
“You are bad with logic,” he says, staring at her. “You eat nachos, then complain every week your stomach hurts. You should
keep me near to remind you.”
I bite at a smile tugging my lips. Gloria does, in fact, eat nachos every week, and every week complains about a stomachache
afterward.
“I like stomachaches.” Gloria thrusts the entire nacho in her mouth. “In fact,” she says through a mouthful, “I vove them.”
“You were also late today. You make people worry.”
“Three minutes does not count as being late in America, Albrecht.”
“Perhaps you should let me call and remind you because you are so forgetful.”
And cue the next hour of backhanded compliments and Gloria-Albrecht bickering.
“Abdallah, you’re up anytime,” I call over my shoulder, pretending not to see him flirting with the girl in the pinstriped
top and skirt holding a platter of cheeseburgers and fries. Which I have to hand it to him is bold—flirting in a second language
when you’re only four months in is not for the weak of heart.
I wait thirty seconds and, when he hasn’t moved, call louder, “ Ab- dall -ah .”
“Hold your horses,” Abdallah calls, then flashes me an unsteady grin.
I flash a tight smile right back. “Correct usage. Wrong time. Get over here.”
As Abdallah shuffles over, he says, “You know, Teacher, I use that to the police today at the airport.”
“What?”
“They want me to move out of the line, the, uh—” He hesitates, motioning with his hands something undiscernible.
I wait patiently. I’m used to waiting.
Giving my students time to fight the battle to find the word is essential in helping them win the war of language learning.
It’s a simple process: giving them confidence in the classroom to raise their hands and use words gives them confidence to
step out of the classroom and order a meal, which gives them confidence to step out into the world and get their license,
and a job, and make friendships with coworkers and neighbors. And have big, beautiful lives.
This is the goal.
Patience is key.
“Parking zone,” he says at last, with a little glint in his eyes. He’s proud of himself for calling up the words, and I smile,
proud of him for remembering them—at four months in no less.
“And?” I say.
“And I say what you teach us. I say”—he enunciates the following words with a broad smile—“hold... your... horses.”
Oof. All proud feelings gone.
I squeeze the bridge of my nose. “Oh, Abdallah . And how did they respond?”
He laughs. Replies with a jilted, “They did not like it.”
Abdallah is one of my newest students, a nineteen-year-old Middle Eastern refugee who, despite the kidnapping of his uncle
that led to a threat upon his family’s life, carries a zest for life that makes him able to pretty much charm his way out
of most things. Oh, and a fondness for using my idioms of the day in inappropriate situations and later bragging about it
in class. Always, I’m pretty sure, to rile me up.
“That’s not—” I shake my head. “No, we’ll talk about it tomorrow. C’mon. It’s your turn.”
As I look back, my eyes catch a glimpse of Jack over by the jukebox, his brows furrowed. He stands in the middle of the crowd,
staring at his phone.
A work frown, of the more significantly displeased type. Last time I saw him so engrossed and unhappy, I asked what it was
with a laugh, thinking it was nothing more than a bad manuscript, and he told me his client had died.
I can’t help wondering over what it is this time.
At my turn, I knock down eight pins.
Socorro, who is always using the aisle of my classroom during breaks to practice with a baseball (much to the chagrin of my
desk lamp and Saliha, who always ends up getting a baseball tangled around her skirt), rejoices flamboyantly over a strike.
Gloria, who just got her nails done and decided she didn’t “need” to put her fingers in the holes in the ball, gets zero.
I look over at Jack.
“Order up,” Pinstripe Girl says, sliding paper bowls and cups to the woman beside him.
I frown as I watch her flash a smile at Jack, who doesn’t look up. My frown becomes a little disgusted as she leans over the counter toward him, her bubblegum lip gloss grin in his downcast face, and asks him if he wants anything.
“Jack,” I call, and he veers off from staring at the phone and our eyes meet. I nod toward the lanes. He jump-starts our way.
“I mean,” Gloria says, “I see women in court lying their heads off for their deadbeat, money-smuggling husbands who are less in tune than the two of you.”
“Impossible. I’d never go to jail for Jack. They don’t have a bowling league.”
“Bryony.” She’s eyeing my hands. I’ve transferred some of Jack’s Oreo ice cream sandwich sundae (the man’s weekly kryptonite) into my
bowl and begun spooning off my peanut bits onto his.
“So,” I say, as Jack slides into the seat beside me. “Who was it?”
There’s a pause from him, and I add, “On the phone?”
“Oh, just Pat, having his weekly mental crisis.” Jack scratches the back of his head, then reaches for the bowl. It’s a curious
pause, the kind that he tends to give when he’s bluffing about something and about to lie to me. One of those, “No, no, of
course I didn’t erase that side character from your manuscript I told you was disturbing. I’m merely an agent, Bryony. Why
would I go messing about with your slash Amelia’s work? And yes, I do understand and respect that what you are doing is art, even if you don’t get to put your name on it.”
He did.
He entirely erased my favorite, possibly creepy, side character from Smuggler’s Paradise .
“Pat... Henderson ?” Gloria says with a little hiss wavering on awe. I cast her a look that says, “ Stop it. Or I’m going to give you the talk—again—about how we don’t dump out the contents of our purses and then thrust them in Jack’s hand whilst begging him to do us a teeny tiny favor and get his client’s autograph on them .”
I decide I don’t care enough to press for reasons behind Jack’s dodginess and move to the more interesting matter. “Did you tell him I saw his books at Costco the other day? Tell him it was ten. I saw a full ten .”
For being a man with four million sold copies and ten years of dedication to the literary field, you’d think he’d have more
self-esteem than he does.
Jack shakes his head, unwilling as always to stoop to this level of affirming obviously successful authors.
“I’m going to meet him for lunch next week. Want to come and tell him the revolutionary news that he is in Costco yourself?”
“Fine.” I hand him a spoon. “He’ll love it.”
“Great.” He digs in. “I’ll bet.” He waves a spoon at those around us. “Have you discussed with everyone yet the change to
our appalling team name?”
“I’ve been thinking on it, and we already have the T-shirts. The team name is going nowhere.”
“I’ll buy new T-shirts.”
“They don’t want new T-shirts.”
“I’ll make them less pink.”
“Maybe we all like pink.”
“Striking Pencils changed their name. Tell you what. Let’s just take their name. I’d much rather have a cobra on my back than this”—he motions to my shirt—“this... pink angelic turtle.”
“Striking Pencils had a team member with a terrifying python backstory. Do you have any terrifying flying turtle memories you’d like to discuss?”
“I once was at the beach and a hundred hatchlings sprouted and began finning toward me. That count?”
“On account of that being a miraculous highlight of your life and the thing people dream would happen to them, no. Keep thinking.
I’m up.”
And I can’t help seeing Gloria’s face watching our interaction as I lick the whipped cream off my spoon one more time before
I set it down and move to stand.
And I can’t help feeling the tiniest little glow in my cheeks as I pick up my ball to bowl.
Which I squash, of course, with the pound of the bowling ball as it lands on the lane and races fiercely toward the pins.
It’s 1 percent because Jack is my agent, and all of my hopes and dreams rest in him (and is it even legal?). And another 1
percent because I’m pretty sure he’s dating two or three women simultaneously at the moment.
And the other 98 percent because I’m dating Parker, and I am, above all, a woman of integrity.
We lose our first game. Win our second. And after a couple hours, the swirling disco ball that at one point in the evening
was fun is becoming sad as it slowly circles on and on, and the music from the jukebox that once was energizing now just pounds
in the ears. The scene around me is starting to sag, as it does every night when it gets past nine thirty and the bed begins
to call.
Overall, it’s a perfectly lovely and typical Wednesday night.
Jose, of course, invites people to hop on over to his apartment for part two of the evening, and the same youthful souls who
always say yes to hanging out till 2:00 a.m. (and don’t mind surviving on a handful of hours’ sleep and copious amounts of
caffeine the next day) say yes.
Meanwhile I shrug on my coat, my body already leaning toward the exit doors.
“I’m slammed. I have a depo at nine and two tomorrow in the city,” Gloria says as she gathers up her things. “What time are
you teaching? Want to meet me for lunch in between?”
“Can’t. I teach to noon and then I’m heading into the city myself.”
Gloria’s eyes narrow. “I thought you were on a tight deadline.”
“I thought you just asked me to lunch regardless of your tight deadline,” I respond with an equally ho-ho-ho now air.
“What do you have going?”
I shrug. “Just work things. You know how it is with my contract.”
“On for helping me find a wedding present tomorrow, yes?” Jack says, suddenly at my side, his T-shirt already stripped off and crumpled in his hand, crisp oxford in its place.
Gloria’s smile grows as she turns from me to him. “Funny. I didn’t know that shopping for wedding presents was part of Bryony’s
contract.”
“Of course it is,” Jack says, readier than I could ever be with a snappy reply. “Under section 13b: Client will make every
effort to support the emotional well-being of agent in question and vice versa as needs fit. Subject to include,” and then
he rattles off very quickly, “weddings, funerals, birthdays, social gatherings, and serving as a plus-one within twenty-four
hours’ notice.”
I cast him a look, prompting the reminder of that one time I ended up breaking dinner plans to be his plus-one for a wedding
in Staten Island on a random Tuesday.
“Four hours’ notice,” he amends. “Pending exceptional food.” He gives me back a look that says, “ I told you there would be a cotton candy station. And there was. ”
Gloria throws up her hands. “All right,” she says, walking between us, “good night, you totally-platonic-not-even-technically-friends
agent and client. Have fun—or not—tomorrow buying registered plates together. I’m going home to break up with Benson and rethink
my life choices.”
She gives us a little wave and is at her car door when I hear her scream.
Albrecht has popped out beside her and is leaning on the hood of the car, hands in pockets. “See?” he says in his thick German
accent. “See how you would feel if someone tried to get you? Good thing I am here to keep you safe.”
Jack follows me to the passenger side door and pops it open. I laugh off Gloria’s previous words, my cheeks still a little
bit hot from her comments directed at us. “It’s unfortunate, you know.”
“What?”
“She spends forty hours a week steeped in courtroom drama. Her whole worldview is unbalanced. I honestly don’t think she can imagine a drama-free relationship.” I drop into the passenger seat.
“Which we definitely have.” He takes my bowling ball bag from my hands.
“Absolutely.” As I’m clicking the seat belt into place, I feel him bend and lean over me, a whiff of his freshly laundered
shirt tickling my nose as he brushes past me. I freeze, hands holding to the seat buckle. He reaches up to the overhead row
of buttons, presses the trunk open feature.
Slowly.
It must be the conversation prompting it, but I feel all the air zip out of my lungs and discover I’m holding my breath.
On the way back out he pauses, just as his face is inches from mine.
He turns by degrees toward me.
There’s a slight, almost roguish twinkle in his eyes. “Sorry. Opening the trunk.”
“Sure,” I say, a little more breathlessly than I meant.
This is nothing.
This means nothing.
It’s mere chemistry. When two people get this close in proximity and have this much of a natural, practical life connection, this is the result. Mere. Chemistry.
My eyes drift to his lips, then quickly rise back to his eyes. I force an easy grin. “How’s Claire?”
“Fine,” he says promptly, scanning my eyes. “How’s Parker?”
“Fine.”
We are all. Just. Fine.
Jack drops me off at my apartment thirty minutes later, and then I do as I do most nights: slip into bed and open my laptop.
Stare at the blinking line on the white screen, waiting for my “masterfully woven” written words. Words that are supposed to be written by “one of the wittiest and most brilliant minds of the twenty -first century,” and precisely not one who still feels a little sick from too much chiftele cu piure and ice cream.
I’m in a tricky spot in my new draft. Twenty thousand words in and currently having a hard time seeing where the characters
are going to go. Currently they lack depth, and a thousand questions hover around me over the computer, begging to be answered
so I can move on—what exactly is Beau’s backstory, and why exactly does she care so much about holding on to the house in Beaufort? What makes her feel alive about it? What essential value does it add to her life? How does it make her who she is today? Basically, why exactly does it matter to her so much that the guy—what’s his name again?—is trying to swoop in and take it out from under her? The son, isn’t it?
And more important, how can I make the manuscript funnier? Funnier.
Lighter.
Brighter.
In the words of Jack, “Fewer ashes of death and more sparkles.” Because as Jack again said, “Nobody wants to put doom and
gloom in their beach bag.”
It’s my unique challenge, keeping my books light as a feather while still conveying a meaningful message and not, now to quote
Amelia, “all the super-boring stuff” that weighs people down.
Rom-com, unlike my Water Under the Bridge , is unique in that sense.
Laugh and fall in love and resolve some of your existential crisis while you go.
Spend a few hours with your eyes skating over pages of happiness, all while the more serious bits of your life get to rest
their legs. Take a break.
Laugh your heart to healing, I like to say. Now there’s a tagline.
Because laughter is a part of life too, isn’t it? Something not to be dismissed as it stands side by side with more serious matters of growth and grief. I’ll never forget the first time I laughed after Mother passed, the brief inhale of air before being plunged underwater again. Laughter is life. To laugh is to live.
And when done right—and isn’t this the challenge, to do it right?—I do find a specific joy in melting together both magic
and message.
Not that Amelia appreciates it.
Or the publisher even, at least those above Susanna’s head.
Push. Push. Push.
The goal is to get it out there faster instead of better , and that, despite myself, I cannot give in to.
Which is just great because you know what that means? It means that here I go again, stressing myself to the max to meet a deadline to keep others
happy while refusing to lessen the quality I demand of myself. For an end product nobody will really care about quality-wise but me. I’m punishing myself here, and not even for my own name. Just... super .
A little ding goes off on the bedside table from my phone and I look over at it, catching my eyes on the little frame of me
with all my students from a surprise birthday party last summer. My hair was shorter then, and in my hands is a massive bouquet
of yellow flowers—a generous gift from my students. The snapshot was taken just before Chen and Takeshi ended up heading back
to Taiwan—a sweet moment before our little gang of students broke up and people moved on. Some on to the next level of courses.
Some to jump that and go straight to their GED test and beyond. A few started community college courses. A few are still in
my class, taking a slower, gentler route. But the beauty of them all is how we still keep in touch—even despite sometimes
being a whole world away.
This. This is what I want.
My simple, sweet life of teaching.
But also writing books I love.
Oh, and also just casually falling into millions of dollars somehow and saving The Bridge from complete destruction.
No problem.