Praise for Midnight Bowling
Midnight Bowling is a brimming, brilliant, deeply American novel rooted in family secrets, young love, and the dark legacy of war. Dalton unlocks long-held, closely guarded family secrets in multi-layered love stories that play out over generations while revealing the beauty of lifelong devotion set against the backdrop of small-town American life. Dalton’s writing is genius, and, with this novel, she’s proven to be a true literary force of nature.
—Julianna Baggott, author of the New York Times Notables Pure Trilogy and Harriet Wolf’s Seventh Book of Wonders
Quinn Dalton gives us fascinating insights about bowling in this excellent novel, but she knows just as much about love’s complexities, particularly between fathers and their children. Midnight Bowling rings true as a perfect strike.
—Ron Rash, author of the New York Times bestseller Serena and The World Made Straight
Midnight Bowling is a terrific novel, not only a page turner, but a substantial piece of love-work. The characters are persons, not characters. The place is place, not setting. The story is convincing, sometimes scary, and often heartwarming. But it is bowling that holds the narrative together. When I felt the power of the sport take hold of me, I knew the book was a solid triumph.
—Fred Chappell, author of I Am One of You Forever and Familiars
© 2016 Quinn Dalton
Cover Design by Laura Williams
Interior Design by April Leidig
Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro by Copperline.
The mission of Carolina Wren Press is to seek out, nurture, and promote literary work by new and underrepresented writers, including women and writers of color.
This publication was made possible by Michael Bakwin’s generous establishment of the Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman and the continued support of Carolina Wren Press by the extended Bakwin family. We gratefully acknowledge the ongoing support of general operations by the Durham Arts Council’s United Arts Fund and the North Carolina Arts Council.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright owner. This novel is a work of fiction. As in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience; however, all names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. No reference to any real person is intended or should be inferred.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dalton, Quinn, author.
Title: Midnight bowling / Quinn Dalton.
Description: Durham, NC : Carolina Wren Press, [2016]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016003012 | ISBN 9780932112828 (alk. paper)
ISBN 9780932112903 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3604.A436 M53 2016 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
For David, Avery, and Alia
TWO MILLION PEOPLE watched that day in January 1963 when my father choked at the pro bowling championship at the Showboat in Las Vegas. Everybody he knew had seen it, and he had plenty of time to think about that on the drive home to Sandusky. He was in the car his coach Leo Florida had left him before he skipped town. Leo had also left him some cash, but he was gone, and my father was alone, and only seventeen years old, and before that he hadn’t been as far as Cincinnati on his own. Since then, not a word from Leo for a decade. No one, including Leo’s own family, knew where he’d gone, though there were plenty of theories—he was back on the hustling circuit, he’d become a Communist spy, he’d gone to jail, he was dead—the last two lines gaining ground when he didn’t show up for his own mother’s funeral.
I didn’t know about any of this when my father took me to the Galaxy Lanes for the first time. It was my ninth birthday, November 8, 1973, and he’d just gotten a promotion at Engineered Fittings, so he said we had a lot to look forward to. And not only that, he said, Leo Florida was back in Sandusky. There was of course no way for me to know what this meant to him even if he’d tried to explain it: who he’d been before I was born, what he’d hoped and dreamed for, and how I figured into any of it.
For me, the big event that year had been that my best friend, Chelsea, who’d lived across the street for as long as we both could remember, had moved at the beginning of the school year to a large split-level built on a former cornfield at the edge of town. Though the development was only a mile or so away, not far on bike, neither of us was allowed to cross any streets with traffic lights. She might as well have moved to China, was how we felt. We’d long believed we were actually sisters, and it was just an oddity that we lived in separate houses. So we cried and hugged as the movers loaded the truck, even promised we’d write a letter a week, though we knew we’d see each other at school, and our mothers had promised to take turns having us over every weekend.
My mother and Mrs. Vickham had spent hours in each other’s kitchens, and I’d thought they were best friends, just as Chelsea and I were. I can see them now—my small-framed mother in a T-shirt and shorts, sipping on a Tab, brown hair in twiggy ponytail, wide-set brown eyes lit with laughter at something Mrs. Vickham had just said. And Mrs. Vickham—willowy, blond, perfectly pressed and coordinated—nodding appreciatively at her own wry humor. She was at least ten years older than my mother, college educated, and a businesswoman—a top Mary Kay sales lady in the area. At the time I couldn’t have known how their different backgrounds might have affected their friendship, such as it was. I imagined our mothers telling secrets under a lace-edged comforter in Chelsea’s room, though of course that was Chelsea and myself, not my mother and Mrs. Vickham.
But our mothers weren’t actually friends, as it turned out. They had just been neighbors. The distinction had escaped me before, and apparently it had escaped my mother as well. In the two months since the move, Mrs. Vickham hadn’t been over once, and my mother and I hadn’t been invited to their new house, though my mother had even called to ask when she could bring their house-warming gift (a casserole dish—in case Mrs. Vickham didn’t already have one? To bring casserole baking to the outer reaches of Sandusky? It wasn’t clear to me). Chelsea and I had our own routine—at home, we were inseparable, but at school she tended to hang out with girls she took tennis lessons with at the Plum Brook Country Club, which her family had joined after her father had gotten the job at Kemper Golf. And I was in Mrs. Turner’s advanced class, so we often didn’t even have the same recess. If we noticed the lack of communication between our mothers, I don’t remember us discussing it—we were still young enough to view the mysteries of adult behavior as unsolvable and beyond our concern.
But my mother was furious. “I guess they’re better than us now,” she said at dinner one night, after she’d managed to catch Mrs. Vickham on the phone only to be promised a call back shortly, which hadn’t happened. My father laughed. “His last job was selling toilet parts!” he said of Mr. Vickham, while my mother stared at him as if he’d suddenly lifted off the ground.
My father, for his part, had maintained a hello-and-nod relationship with Mr. Vickham for all the years they’d been neighbors, which had seemed completely satisfying for him, and not worth pining for in its absence. Topics of discussion, if our fathers happened to be retrieving their papers or doing yard work at the same time, were limited to matters of upcoming or in-progress home repairs, the Cleveland Browns, and fishing conditions. Our street dead-ended into Lake Erie,