“She’s going to come through that door in about five minutes,” I said. “When she does, you all yell her name as loud as you can. Then we bowl. Then we eat. Sound good?”
They cheered so loud that Frank put his hands over his ears behind the counter.
My mother, standing by the pizza boxes, caught my eye and pressed her lips together the way she does when she is trying not to cry in public.
At two-oh-three the front door opened, and a blast of February air came in with it.
Piper came through first. She was wearing a purple T-shirt under her open coat, and her long light brown hair was pulled into a side braid over one shoulder.
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She was looking down at her phone, which is really her mother’s old phone.
Shauna was right behind her, in a gray parka, digging in her purse for something. Nolan was behind Shauna, holding the door, a gift bag in his other hand.
“Piper!” twenty-two kids yelled at once.
My daughter stopped so fast her mother walked right into her back. She looked up. She looked at the lanes, all eight of them lit up.
She looked at the kids, every one of them from her classroom, every one of them with their arms in the air.
For a second she did not move at all. Then she made a sound I had never heard from her, a kind of shriek that started low and kept going up. And then she dropped her coat on the carpet and ran.
Ella got to her first. Then Eli. Then about six others, and in a second Piper disappeared into a pile of third graders, all of them hugging and jumping, and I lost sight of her braid completely.
Shauna did not move.
She stood just inside the door with the cold air still coming in around her. Her purse hung open off her shoulder.
She looked at the lanes, and at the kids, and at the table of pizza boxes, and at my mother standing behind it.
Then she looked at me.
I had not said one word to her about the $700. Not when I sent it, not since. I had not planned to say anything about it today, either. That was not what today was for.
She walked across the alley toward me, slow, like she was walking across ice. Nolan stayed by the door.
He gave me a short nod, the kind men give each other in a hardware store, and then he went and stood by my mother.
Shauna stopped at the counter where the shoes come out. Frank, who did not know her from Adam and did not know a thing about Branson, looked at her feet the way he looks at everybody’s feet.
“Size eight?” he asked, and set a pair of red-and-blue rented shoes on the counter in front of her.
She looked down at the shoes. Then she looked up at me and opened her mouth.
For a moment, nothing came out. I could see her trying to decide. It was the same face she made when she was twenty-two and trying to figure out whether to tell me she was pregnant.
“You didn’t tell me it was the whole class,” she said finally.