My mother felt it, too. Of course we talked about our days at dinner the way we’d always done, but she was no longer in the same orbit with my father and me. It never occurred to me to think about how this felt for her.
For my father, and so also for me, what mattered was bowling a perfect game. Leo teased us about it. “Perfection is a nice side-effect of winning,” he said whenever he heard us talking about it, how we’d come close, or where we’d fallen short. My father ignored him, and told me to do likewise. But by then things had eased between them. They seemed to me like the old men at the bar when they came back from fishing, telling different stories about the same catch—calling each other liars but laughing it off just the same.
Maybe my father’s quest mattered even more to us both when the first wedges of pain forced their way into his knees, then his shoulders, and then all his joints. The year I turned eleven, he was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. His doctor warned him that there may be only a few years, given his young age at the time of diagnosis, before a wheelchair claimed him. Over the years, he slept less and less. He woke me up many nights once I started high school, nudging my shoulder with the toe end of his sliding shoe, his bag in his other hand. “C’mon,” he’d whisper, and I’d pull on sweatpants and follow his slow progress downstairs and out to the car. Sometimes Leo was just closing up, but he’d let us in anyway, and there we’d be on Lane 3, with the whole town asleep. Most nights, Leo’s nephew, Donny, would be there, too, and I wondered if he’d even gone home for dinner. Of course, I never asked. I was there because my father wanted me there, and that was enough for me. Sometimes, with everything dark and just the lights along the lanes glowing against the spaceship-dotted carpeting, I felt as if we were sailing, the whole place a ship skimming over the lake.
During those late-night practices, my father taught me the roll was in the release. The perfect strike lived in the grip, in the swing of my arm, in the lift off my fingers, in the letting go. He talked about how good I was, and how I could do anything I wanted with an arm like mine. By that time I was almost as tall as he was, and though I had my mother’s coloring (my brown hair tinged blond in the summers, just like hers), I was broad shouldered and skinny like him. When I looked at my arms and wrists and hands, I could see a smaller version of my father’s same lines, and sometimes I wondered if the pain he was enduring was lurking in my own joints.
And for all he did to hide it, he suffered more and more as the years passed. It didn’t matter how many tournaments I won, how many trophies he placed in our window, which I would quietly take down and hide in my room so as not to seem to be boasting to the neighbors. It didn’t matter that I lettered as a freshman at Sandusky High. That was the year he started taking so many prescriptions that he needed a special box to keep them straight—different ones to help him sleep, to control nausea, to give him a steadier hand at Engineered Fittings (“A job is a job, isn’t it?” he’d say when I asked him how was work). His body was freezing up as surely as it had at the Showboat in Vegas, and no one could stop it.
Still, I had this feeling that if I got good enough, if I could roll a perfect game, maybe I could stop it. Correct action could perhaps prevail after all. I started looking for any advantage. So I asked him if I could get one of those just-out urethane AMFs that was designed for the new regulation lane conditioners, unlike the old models that were made to go on oil. He always said soon, soon—when he had time to research it, when he could talk to my mother, when we had the money.
And then, seven years to the day after I first walked into the Galaxy Lanes, on the afternoon of my sixteenth birthday in 1980, my father and I stood inside the doorway, unzipping our jackets to let some heat in. Chelsea, who already had her driver’s license and a new car to go with it, was going to take me out later for dinner and a movie, and possibly some beer pinched from her father’s garage cooler. But the most important thing was cradled in my arms like a baby: my own AMF Angle, still in its box, glittering gold-green through the cut-out window.
Donny was working the call boxes; he waved to me from the counter. I waved back. I could smell a tickle of chalk in the air, and I breathed it in, the way you do when you’re home. Because I was, standing there with my father, checking out who was rolling that Saturday morning as the fall chill seeped from our clothing. I loved the place. I loved how it all fit together, each area with its purpose: the lines of shoes behind the counter, the rows of balls like huge Christmas ornaments, the dark-paneled lounge, where the low red velvet couches looked slouchily dangerous, even though they were faded by then from sunlight that came through the glass emergency exit Leo had installed to meet fire codes. The pro shop and arcade. And then the lanes: twenty-four of them, each crowned with rounded, chrome-trimmed ball returns like little spaceships, the red triangular hubs in the middle with the shiny hand driers and the call box if you needed a manager to set splits for practice or fix a sticking sweep. Fanned around the returns were the booths and chairs for the different teams, and behind them, the consoles where you kept score, with their fold-out drink holders and ashtrays I had to clean out each night if I closed.
My father looked at me and smiled, tapped the box in my arms. He was feeling good that day. This was the ball I’d go pro with, he had already explained. I hugged it to my chest and smiled back.
“Now, we know the local color and you’ve got the city tourney in the bag, right?” My father paused, and I finally looked up from my gleaming new ball. He was waiting, eyebrows raised, a crackle of electricity in his gaze. “Right?” he said again. I nodded.
“Then there’s district. We could even skip city if we want to. And then you’ll qualify for state.” He scanned the lanes, rubbing his chin. Leo was behind the counter as usual that day, handing out a pair of rentals, phone pinched to his ear—this was before Donny put in the second line. My father chewed his bottom lip and then nodded—he’d decided on something. “Now Leo’s going to want you to do the scratch division this year, and we know why, because you’ll make him look good. But you might not have time for that. Then again, it’s pinfall only.”
“And the JTBA, that’s scratch, too,” I said.
But my father wasn’t that excited about the Junior Bowlers Tournament Association. A kid my age from Mount Vernon had just started it that fall, and there’d only been a couple of events, and there was no route to go national. But I liked that there wasn’t a girls’ division, though that was only because the participant numbers were still so small.
I shifted from one foot to the other. I squinted down at my ball, and the glitter seemed to float just above its blue-green surface. I wanted to roll it right then, though I knew that even if Leo could drill it that day, I’d have to wait a couple of days for the grips to set.
My father, meanwhile, had moved on to how we should convince the PBA to agree to full membership instead of just the junior even though I was only sixteen, or maybe we should just get through the current season, and after that my birthday wouldn’t be that far off, and we’d have a better case if I was closer to seventeen. Which was the age he’d been when he went to Vegas. He had that look on his face—wide-eyed now, jaw set—that I imagined he’d had when he stood at the top of the lane at the Showboat, just before something in him gave.
And that was what made me ask if he was sure.
“Sure about what?” he asked, that flash again in his eyes.
“Just because I’m so young,” I said, meaning because you were so young.
“We’re doing this right,” my father said then. “Textbook.”
I nodded. I was on board, as long as I could roll that ball. My mother would be none too happy about how much it had cost, but I knew that what mattered more was that my father and I had our plan, and that we were prepared.
My father headed for the lockers, and I followed. Only the slightest hitch in his stride suggested he might be feeling less well than he acted. We passed Leo at the counter. He still had the phone pinched to his ear, but he nodded to us as we passed and jerked his head toward the pro shop to say he’d be right there.
“The Tour,” Leo had always