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 notonlybecause 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.