Chapter 35
Chapter Thirty-Five
Madison
Cedar Falls Bowl was exactly what it looked like from the outside—loud, slightly sticky underfoot, and permeated by that universal smell of rented shoes and old popcorn.
There were neon lights, the rhythmic crash of pins, and a pop song from three years ago playing through speakers that had seen better days.
Lily stood in the entrance, taking it all in with wide eyes.
"It's loud," she said.
"It gets louder," Jack said.
She looked at him. Then back at the lanes. Then she straightened slightly, the way she did when she'd decided something was going to be fine, and walked in.
Jack caught my eye over her head. Something in his face that was almost a smile.
We got our shoes. Lily’s were red, a color she approved of with a single, sharp nod.
Mine were two sizes too big—a universal bowling alley experience I’d learned to accept as my lot in life.
We found our lane at the far end, safely distanced from a rowdy group of teenagers who were taking up three lanes and doing very little to improve the ambient noise level.
Lily examined the scoring screen with great seriousness. "How do you get a strike?"
"Knock all the pins down in one go," Jack said.
"Has anyone ever gotten all strikes?"
"A perfect game," Jack told her. "It’s rare. One in a million for most people."
She considered the pins at the end of the lane. "I'm going to try for that."
"Lily, it’s your first time bowling," I pointed out.
She looked at me, her expression entirely flat. "So?"
Jack made a sound behind me. It was a low, huffing noise, and I was fairly sure that was him suppressing a laugh.
I ignored him and selected the lightest ball available, a pale pink six-pounder that Lily immediately claimed as her own.
We negotiated a diplomatic system where she got the pink one and I took the eight-pound blue, a choice my wrist was already beginning to regret.
Lily went first. She lugged the pink ball toward the line with both hands, her jaw set with the intensity of someone approaching an important task. She released it. The ball didn't so much roll as it did wander, eventually losing interest and drifting directly into the gutter.
She turned around, expression blank.
"The floor is slippery," she said.
"It is," Jack agreed, entirely straight-faced.
She went back, picked up the ball, and tried again. This time it curved wildly to the left and took out two pins on the edge, which she accepted with a nod like she'd planned it.
Jack went next. He didn't spend time choosing a ball; he just grabbed a heavy black one, stepped to the line without any ceremony, and let it go.
It was a clean, thunderous strike. The sound of it echoed off the back wall, loud and final.
He turned around, looked at neither of us, and sat back down to pick up his drink.
I stared at the empty space where the pins had been.
"You've done this before," I said.
"Once or twice."
"How many times, Jack?" I pressed. "Because people who have done this 'once or twice' don't sound like a building collapsing when they hit the pins."
He considered. "I worked with a guy in Montana who was obsessed. Nearest alley was forty miles away." He shrugged. "We went a lot."
I looked at him, trying to reconcile the image of a younger, drifting Jack Henley in a Montana bowling alley with the man sitting in front of me now.
I picked up my ball. I took my run-up—a three-step approach I’d seen on a sports channel once—and released it with what I felt was reasonable technique. I watched with growing indignity as it curved steadily, almost purposefully, into the right-hand gutter.
"The floor is very slippery," Lily said. Her voice was remarkably kind.
"Thank you, Lily."
Jack was looking at the lane with his mouth doing something he was clearly working to control. I sat down next to him and he handed me my drink without looking at me, which was somehow more insulting than if he’d just laughed out loud.
"Go ahead," I said, taking a sip of the watered-down soda. "Get it out of your system."
"I'm not saying anything."
"You're thinking it very loudly, Jack. I can hear the judgment from here."
He looked at me then, and the something he'd been controlling broke through, and he laughed—quiet and genuine, the kind that sat in the chest—and I felt it land somewhere it had no business landing and looked back at the lane.
I was suddenly very interested in the scoring monitor.
The game went on. Lily improved incrementally and announced each improvement like a press release.
Jack bowled with the competence he brought to most physical things, which I was trying not to notice.
I got progressively better at accepting that I was terrible at this and progressively worse at pretending that the evening was just a nice outing with a five year old.
Midway through the second game Lily needed the bathroom and Jack took her, and I sat in our little plastic chairs and watched the lane and the noise of the place washed over me and I let myself, just for a second, look at what was actually happening.
I was here because I’d wanted to be here.
Not because of Lily—or not only because of Lily.
I’d countered his text with this plan before I’d even finished deciding it was a good idea.
I’d been saying yes in one way or another for two months, telling myself it was about Cassie’s memory or doing the right thing for a grieving child.
None of those were lies, but none of them were the whole truth, either.
The whole truth was currently fifteen feet away in a fluorescent-lit bathroom, holding a denim jacket while a little girl washed her hands.
I looked at the ceiling, blinking against the neon glare.
They came back. Lily appeared first, skip-walking with a new, determined bounce in her step. She had apparently had a philosophical conversation with a stranger at the sinks about the merits of the "granny-style" push versus a one-handed release and was now reconsidering her entire approach.
Jack sat down next to me and handed me a fresh drink he’d grabbed on the way back. Our shoulders brushed as he settled in. I didn't shift away. Neither did he.
"She talked to someone in the bathroom?" I asked.
"She talks to everyone," he said, his voice low enough to slip under the heavy bass of the music. "I've started expecting it. I think she’s checking to see if the rest of the world is as weird as we are."
"Is that terrifying?"
"Every time." He looked at Lily, who was selecting the pink ball with renewed, bathroom-informed purpose. "Also kind of incredible."
I looked at him looking at her. It was the easy way he said it, the lack of the defensive edge he’d arrived in town with. This was the man who had spent a decade moving from one zip code to the next, now completely, unguardedly anchored by a five-year-old who had decided he was hers.
I looked back at the lane.
Lily's second-game approach, informed by bathroom wisdom, resulted in four pins. She celebrated like it was twelve.
We played three games. Jack won two. I won one on a technicality involving a foot-fault that Lily disputed with the fervor of a high-court judge all the way to the exit.
The night air hit us like a cold sheet when we pushed through the double doors.
Lily walked between us, and without asking or even looking up, she reached out and took both our hands.
It was a reflexive, easy gesture, as if the three of us walking linked through a dark parking lot was just how Friday nights were supposed to end.
Jack looked at me over her head. His expression was unreadable, but his hand didn't pull away from hers. I looked back, my lungs feeling the bite of the April air.
Lily stopped walking abruptly. She looked up at me with those serious, dark Henley eyes, her small hand still tucked firmly in mine.
"Come home for dinner," she said. It wasn't a request; it was a directive.
I opened my mouth to offer one of the many rational, adult excuses I’d been rehearsing in my head since the second game.
"We have leftovers," she added, sensing a hesitation she wasn't prepared to accept. "From yesterday. Uncle Jack made too much. It’s good."
Jack remained silent. He was looking somewhere slightly to the left of me, a tell I’d come to recognize as his way of staying out of the blast zone. He wasn't pushing, and he wasn't pulling. He was just leaving the door unlatched and letting me decide if I wanted to walk through it.
I looked down at Lily. I looked at her hand in mine
"Okay," I said.
Lily nodded, satisfied, and started walking again, pulling us both along behind her like she'd known all along how this was going to go.
Which, knowing Lily, she almost certainly had.