The Saturday I Rented the Bowling Alley

Then Piper took the ball for her own frame, stepped up, and rolled it slow and straight down the middle.

It wobbled the whole way. It kissed the bumper once. Then it hit the head pin square, and every pin went down.

She turned around and ran back up the approach toward me, jumping the whole way in her red-and-blue rented shoes, her braid flying over her shoulder.

I was standing by the big front window in my black hoodie. I put both hands up without thinking. She slapped them with both of hers so hard my palms stung for ten minutes after.

Behind her, a bunch of her classmates were cheering with their arms up in the air, like she had just won the state tournament.

Behind them, my mother stood at the table of pizza boxes with her short dark hair, setting out slices and smiling down at them.

The pins at the end of the lane were already being set back up.

The lights on all eight lanes were glowing in that old orange way, and outside the front windows it was the gray middle of a winter afternoon in Montana.

I have that moment in my head the way some people keep a photograph in their wallet. If I live to be ninety, I will still be able to see it.

After that, things moved fast the way kids’ parties do. Pizza went in waves. Somebody spilled lemonade on lane six and Frank mopped it up himself without one cross word.

A little girl lost a tooth in a slice of sausage and was thrilled about it.

Nolan ended up behind the pizza table with my mother, folding empty boxes and handing out napkins.

At one point I came over for a slice and caught him in the middle of a story about plowing out a school bus on the Laurel road in the 2019 blizzard.

“Your mom tells me you do pipe work,” he said when I walked up.

“Structural, mostly,” I said. “Some pipe at the refinery when they need it.”

He nodded. Then he set down the box he was folding and looked me in the face, which I respected.

“I should have stood up to my mother on the dates,” he said. “That’s on me. Shauna would have called you in November if I’d backed her. I didn’t. I’m sorry about Piper’s birthday.”

“I appreciate it,” I said, and I meant it. “You’ve been good to her, Nolan. I know you have. She talks about the plow truck like it’s a parade float.”

He laughed, and something between the two of us that I had not even known was tight let go.

My mother stood behind us cutting a pepperoni pizza into perfect squares, pretending she had not heard a word.

Around three o’clock, Mom brought out the second cake. She had baked it herself that morning, chocolate again, with purple frosting again, because she knew it was what Piper picked every year. Nine candles.

Twenty-two kids sang Happy Birthday so loud and so off-key that two men from the Tuesday league, who had stopped in for coffee at the lunch counter, joined in from their stools. One of them had a voice like a church bass.