The lake, and what weather it might bring, was another source of brief but serious exchanges between my father and Mr. Vickham, providing a note of continuity when the Browns weren’t playing or neither man had been fishing recently. Mr. Vickham was given to grunting if it could convey his point as well as actual words, and my father had mused in front of me once about whether Mr. Vickham could string together a full sentence if money was on the table. But after the Vickhams moved, and it began to dawn on my mother that her friendship with Mrs. Vickham had been one of convenience rather than true attachment, my father professed to miss the Vickhams greatly, which only provoked my mother more. I knew not to so much as mention Chelsea’s name at home unless I wanted to hear about the Vickhams’ general lack of propriety, along with the specifics of how they were ruining Chelsea.
“I know her mother lets her wear makeup,” my mother said out of the blue one time while pouring my cereal before school. But Chelsea and I often played with the Mary Kay samples Chelsea’s mother gave us, which my mother knew, and I saw no gain in pointing this out.
Chelsea and I had worked out my birthday plan at school, not trusting logistics to our mothers. Chelsea would come with us to dinner at Frisch’s Big Boy and then to a movie, and then spend the night. Since I knew my mother would refuse to drive to Chelsea’s house herself without a formal invite from Mrs. Vickham—probably at that point it would’ve had to have been engraved—I’d enlisted my father to handle transportation.
So on that morning of my birthday, I sat in the living room watching cartoons, waiting for the day to pass, wondering what news Chelsea would have for me when afternoon finally came. Our games at that time involved pretending we lived in a New York apartment, or in a spaceship, or in college—nowhere specifically, more like College, a destination in and of itself. Anyway, there was a travel theme. She had already made it clear that she would be leaving Sandusky the day after we graduated from high school, and that she would take me with her if I wanted. Where we were going was not a detail I remember us discussing—it was the fact of leaving that mattered. I pretended to be excited about the idea, but I couldn’t seem to make myself care either way, maybe because we still had a good eight years—another lifetime, almost—before any of these decisions would be available to us. And perhaps also because I had begun to suspect, even at just-turned-nine, that the world held nothing of great interest for me. The world had presented itself, and seemed not too hard to get along in, but nothing had claimed my heart yet, and maybe nothing would. Chelsea allowed me to drift along in her schemes and obsessions, and that was as close as I figured I would get to real excitement.
So when my father came into the living room from the garage that morning, walking briskly and wearing a jacket, I thought he was going to suggest picking up Chelsea early, and I sat up from the couch and began looking around for my shoes.
“How do you know we’re going somewhere?”
“You’re jingling your keys,” I said.
My father laughed, pulled his hand from his pocket. In his other hand he held an odd-shaped leather bag. I’d seen it in the garage hunched like an animal on the metal shelves behind jugs of antifreeze, the zippered, curved spine furred with a greasy dust. It had never occurred to me to ask about that bag or to look inside it; I imagined it held something dormant, better left alone. But that day, even in the gray light, I could see the leather had been cleaned. It smelled of shoe polish and car exhaust.
“You want to come with me?” my father asked.
I was happy to go anywhere, just to get out for a while. I turned off the TV and found my sneakers in the kitchen and sat down to put them on as he told me about the Galaxy Lanes and Leo Florida—names and places that meant nothing to me—and all that we had ahead of us. He was so tall to me then, his wrist bones poking past the edges of his sleeves, his shoulders curling inward as if he might be about to crouch down and cover his head, as we’d been taught to do in school tornado drills. He had red hair, gray eyes, high cheekbones and a largish nose, and a smile that took over his face. He was only twenty-eight years old—my parents were nineteen when I was born—and pictures of them from my early years show them as the full-grown children they were, skinny, big-eyed, grinning. But he was my father, and thus ageless to me then.
He reminded me to get my jacket as I got to my feet. He seemed in a bit of a hurry as we headed out, closing the front door quietly so as not to wake my mother, and I wondered if he might be worried that she would stop us. Later I thought it more likely he was worried he would change his mind.
“Leo,” my father said when we were in the car and on our way. He might have been starting to tell me something about him, or practicing how he would greet him. I kept my eyes on the view over the dashboard; I already knew you could pick up a lot if you seemed not to be listening. My father turned on First Street, then Ogontz, then Cleveland Road, and then into the gravel lot of the Galaxy Lanes, a place I had been driven past for all the years of my life without incident or comment, a place that had no mark on the map of my world until that day. It was only a few minutes by car from our house.
We coasted toward the aluminum arches of the Galaxy Lanes, which I guess had been designed to look space-aged but by then seemed as sweetly corny to me as the Star Trek reruns I watched after school. The lot wasn’t crowded but my father parked way off to one side, half on the grass. He cut the engine and looked up at himself in the rearview mirror. “Stay close to me,” he said as we got out, which thrilled me, though I had no intention of doing anything but.
I should point out that my father had never so much as mentioned bowling before. He’d never turned the television dial to ABC during PBA nationals, and we’d never watched “Make that Spare” or “Bowling for Dollars” while those shows still aired. My experience of sports of any kind had come through Chelsea, who, like her mother and older brothers, played tennis, while her father played golf—pastimes which seemed to involve a lot of green and hot sun and seemed to be as much about what you wore as what you did. My parents did not play any sports, and never had, to my knowledge. My father didn’t even own a pair of sneakers—he did chores in his paint-splattered jeans and fishing boots. His idea of fun—and mine, too—was a day fishing in Put-in-Bay with a stop off at the Bait Barn for a bottled cold Vernors for me and beer for him, or bird-watching at Crane State Park, or ghost hunting on Johnson Island, where the last Civil War POWs were said to drift like smoke to the beaches in the evening, trapped by Lake Erie’s dark water. My mother rarely came on these expeditions, not being a fan of fishing, birds, or the outdoors in general. She shooed us out the door with bagged lunches. This was fine by me because I was my father’s daughter, eager to know what he loved—a promise that something hidden would be revealed, that I might be the only witness.
And that was how I felt that day, on the way to the Galaxy Lanes, until we stepped inside and stopped on a stretch of worn red carpet. The red looked to have been cut in to replace the spaceship-patterned stuff—which, I noticed as my eyes adjusted to the dimmer light, covered the rest of the place from the floors to midway up the walls. There were body-sized bleached streaks at our feet from the salt people had tracked in.
“Place has seen better years,” my father said, and I had to agree. It didn’t look to me like anything space-aged had happened in that place for a long time, if ever.
Ahead of us were the lanes. A father with some kids at one end. To our right, a few old men hanging by their elbows at the bar, cigarette smoke thick above their heads. There seemed to be no women around. I pointed to the row of red, shiny, rounded objects that looked like the fenders of old cars—one at the top of each lane. “The ball returns,” my father said. He pulled me along with him toward the counter, and I bounced at the end of his hand like a netted fish, already itching to leave. I was thinking of what I would say to