The Saturday I Rented the Bowling Alley

It took him nine months and eleven thousand dollars, and at the end of it his little boy would not look at either parent at the Christmas program.

A judge in Yellowstone County could maybe tell Shauna she was wrong. But no judge alive was ever going to give a nine-year-old girl her birthday back.

And half a trip was cheaper than a war my daughter would have to live in the middle of.

So I dried my hands and sent the $700 that night. I did not write a message with it.

I just sent it, and then I sat down at the kitchen table and stared at the wall for a while.

Then I called my mother.

She picked up on the first ring, like she always does after nine at night, because in her world a phone ringing after nine means somebody is in the hospital. I told her about the bill. She was quiet a long time.

“Did you pay it?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good,” she said, and that surprised me. “Now don’t you dare stew on it. Tell me something. What does that little girl want more than anything in this world?”

I knew the answer before she finished asking. Piper is not a toy kid. She is not a screen kid either. Since kindergarten, every birthday wish, every Christmas list, has been about the same thing.

Her friends.

Shauna and I split up when Piper was four, and she has spent half her life going back and forth between two houses on opposite sides of town. The one thing that never changes is her classroom.

She has been with most of the same kids since kindergarten. She knows whose grandpa has cancer and whose dog had puppies.

She saves the green crayons for a boy named Eli because green is the only color he likes.

“Her class,” I said. “She’d want her whole class.”

“Then give it to her,” Mom said. “Branson had a waterpark. It didn’t have one kid who sits by her at lunch. You find a place, and I will handle the food, and do not argue with me about the food.”

I did not sleep much that night. Around midnight I got up and wrote numbers on the back of an envelope, the way my dad used to figure a job. Twenty-some kids. A Saturday afternoon. Somewhere warm, since it was February in Montana.

At six the next morning, before my shift, I drove out to the bowling alley on the edge of town.

It is an old eight-lane place with wood-paneled walls and a lunch counter, and it has been there since before I was born.

Frank, who owns it, was already inside running the lane machine. He is seventy-one and has bowled in the Tuesday men’s league for forty years.

His son Kevin welds with me, which is the only reason I had his cell number.

“You want the whole place?” Frank said when I asked him. He leaned on the counter and pushed his glasses up. “For a kid’s birthday? How many kids are we talking about?”

“Her whole third-grade class,” I said. “I don’t have the number yet. Somewhere around twenty.”

Frank looked at me for a second like he was deciding something. Then he pulled out a spiral notebook from under the register and flipped it open to the next Saturday.