The Saturday I Rented the Bowling Alley

“Are you sad, Daddy?” she asked at the end, because she always asks that. She is the kind of kid who notices a dog limping from across a parking lot.

“Not a bit,” I lied. “You go have the best birthday in Missouri. We’ll do cake when you get back.”

When I hung up, I sat in the cab of my pickup with the heater running and watched the steam come off the refinery stacks across the river. I did not go back inside to finish my sandwich.

That Saturday I worked a half day of overtime because I did not know what else to do with myself.

Then I drove over to my mother’s place in the Heights with the chocolate cake on the passenger seat.

My mom is Doreen Rennick. She is fifty-eight, five foot two, with short dark hair she has cut the same way since I was in kindergarten.

She ran the lunch line at an elementary school for twenty-six years and does not scare.

She took one look at the cake and set two plates on the kitchen table without a word.

Then she cut two pieces, poured two glasses of milk, and sat down across from me like we were at a wake.

“Did you call her?” she asked.

“At nine this morning,” I said. “She was at breakfast with Nolan’s whole family. She sounded happy. Somebody sang to her. I heard it through the phone.”

Mom nodded and pushed her fork through the purple frosting. My dad, Ron, passed three years ago this spring.

He was a welder too. Since then my mother has made it her business to be the person who shows up.

“Your father missed her second birthday for a pipeline job in North Dakota,” she said. “He cried in a motel room in Williston. He told me later it was the worst night of his life. You two are more alike than you know.”

I did not cry in her kitchen. But I sat there a long time after the cake was gone, and she let me, and when I left she put the rest of it in a foil pan and said Piper would still want it Monday.

Monday night, around eight, my phone buzzed on the counter while I was scrubbing a skillet. I figured it was Shauna saying they were home safe. It was Shauna, but that is not what it said.

“Your half of the trip is $700. Flights, room, park passes and show tickets for Piper. It was her birthday too, so it seems fair we split it. You can send it whenever.”

Under that she had typed out the numbers. Round trip from Billings to Springfield with a stop in Denver. Her share of a two-queen room for four nights. The waterpark wristbands. Two shows. A souvenir sweatshirt.

It came to $1,400 even. She had divided it by two.

I stood in my kitchen with soap running down my wrist and read the list over and over, the way you keep pressing on a bruise.

Seven hundred dollars. For a trip I was not invited on, on a weekend that was mine.

I want to be honest about what I thought in that first hour, because I was not thinking anything decent. I thought about calling a lawyer. I thought about writing back something I could never take back.

I had a buddy from high school who went to court over a holiday schedule.