Every Thursday Grandpa and I bowl two games and split a basket of fries. He has not missed a Thursday since Grandma died.
The guy in the white tank top thought it was funny to knock Grandpa’s ball into the gutter and pour his beer over my shoes.
When Grandpa told him to apologize, he swung. Grandpa caught his fist. Then his two friends stood up.
Lane six
They came around the ball return from lane seven. The skinny one in the green shirt and the big one with the cap on backwards. They stopped at Cody’s shoulders.
Grandpa still had Cody’s fist. From where I stood he didn’t look like he was squeezing it. He was just holding it, the way he holds a pickle jar before he opens it for me.
“Sit down before you break a hip,” Cody said. He said it loud, so lane four would hear.
Grandpa let go. Cody had been leaning into the fist, so he went back a step and bumped the big one in the chest.
“Apologize to her,” Grandpa said.
Then he did something I had never seen him do. He worked his wedding ring over his knuckle, took my hand, put the ring in my palm and closed my fingers around it.
He didn’t take that ring off for Grandma’s funeral. He doesn’t take it off to bowl, and it clicks against the ball every single time he picks it up.
My socks were soaked through. The beer had gone straight through the canvas and it was cold.
My phone was on the scoring table, propped against the fries basket where I’d set it at the start of the first game. I grabbed it. The red timer was still going. 41:09, 41:10. I hit stop so I could dial.
“Don’t,” Grandpa said.
He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the three of them.
“Grandpa, I’m calling…”
“Brookie. Don’t call anybody.”
Three of them in front of him, and he didn’t want the police.
Root beer
Grandma died two years ago in September. Eleven weeks from when they found it to the funeral home on Jackson Street.
The day after the funeral was a Thursday. Mom called his house at seven to check on him and he didn’t pick up, and she called me crying because she thought he’d done something. I drove over. His truck was gone.
He was at Starlite. Lane six, by himself, bowling two games, with a basket of fries nobody was eating on the scoring table.
I sat down next to him and he slid the basket over. That was it. That was the whole conversation. I’ve come every Thursday since.
Lane six is their lane. Gail at the counter gives it to him without asking. She’s been working nights there since before my mom was in middle school, and she’s the only person alive who calls him Ronnie. She brings his root beer before he gets his shoes on.
He doesn’t drink. Not a beer at Thanksgiving, not champagne at Mom’s wedding. When I was maybe twelve I asked him why and he said he never liked the taste. My mom was standing at the sink and I saw her face when he said it. She didn’t turn around for a while.
Grandma used to film his tenth frame on her phone and send it to the family group chat with about nine emojis. When she got sick, she couldn’t hold the phone up long enough, so I started doing it for her. Then I just never stopped.
I’m bad at timing it. He’s slow on his approach and I always miss the release. So I prop the phone on the scoring table against whatever’s there and let it record both games, and I trim it in the car before I send it. Mom hearts it every time. Uncle Darrell never does.
There’s a claw machine by the front doors with the same pink bear in the corner of it that’s been there since I was a kid. Nobody has ever won it. I don’t think it’s possible to win it.
Grandpa ran a press at the transmission plant for twenty-six years until it closed, then drove parts for a supplier out on 67. That’s most of what I know about his life. In eighth grade we had to do a family tree project with a paragraph about each grandparent, and I asked him what he did before he met Grandma.
“Worked,” he said. “Met your grandma. Nothing worth writing down.”
He has forearms like a guy who carries engines. He told me once he wrestled a little at the Y as a kid. A little.
I had his ring in my fist now. It was still warm from his finger.
Mike’s kid
Cody and his friends had been on lane seven since we got there. You couldn’t not notice them.
Cody bought the pitchers. He high-fived the guys on lane nine he didn’t know. He leaned over the divider during our first game to read Grandpa’s score off the screen and said, “Grandpa’s got a 180 going, holy shit,” like he was a fan. He called me sweetheart twice. I ignored it both times, the way I ignore it at the register at Kroger when guys do it, which is a lot.
The big one with the cap kept saying, “Come on, man.” Every time Cody got too loud. Every time Cody leaned over the divider. He never said it loud enough to matter.
Ninth frame, second game, Grandpa was on his approach. Cody stepped across onto our approach like he was going to the bathroom and bumped his elbow right at the release. The ball went in the gutter at about the arrows.
The three of them lost it. Cody turned around laughing, and he had his cup in his hand, and he looked right at me and turned it over. Not spilled. Turned it over, slow, on my shoes.
That’s when Grandpa told him to apologize. You already know what happened next.
Now Cody was rubbing his hand and grinning, and the two friends were on either side of him, and I looked past them to the counter for Gail.
Gail had the phone in her hand. The old cordless one. She wasn’t dialing.
“Gail,” I said. “Can you call somebody?”
“She ain’t calling nobody,” Cody said. He didn’t even turn around. “My dad owns the place, sweetheart.”
I didn’t know that. I’d been coming for two years and I didn’t know whose place it was. I thought it was just Starlite, the way the Kroger is just the Kroger.
So I tried the other thing. I put my hand on Grandpa’s arm.
“It’s fine,” I said. “They’re just shoes. They’re like forty dollars. Let’s go home.”
“Listen to her, Grandpa,” Cody said. “Go home. Get your fiber.”
The skinny one, in the green shirt, laughed through his nose.
Grandpa didn’t move. My hand was on his arm and it was like having my hand on the hood of a car.
“When he apologizes,” Grandpa said.
“I’m not apologizing for shit,” Cody said. “She’s fine. Look at her. She’s fine.”
Gail put the phone down on the counter. Then she lifted the flap at the end of the counter and came out from behind it.
Mom
The skinny one was named Shane. I know that because Cody said, “Shane, grab Grandpa’s ball,” and Shane did.
Grandpa’s ball is maroon, a Hammer, sixteen pounds. Grandma bought it for him for their anniversary in 2001 and there’s a chip by the thumb hole where he dropped it in the parking lot the first week. He gets mad if anybody else picks it up. He’s never said so. He just takes it out of their hands.
Shane picked it up off the return with both hands like a watermelon.
“Shane,” Gail said. She was halfway between the counter and us. “Put that down, hon.”
Shane looked at Cody. Cody nodded at the lane.
Shane stepped up and rolled it. Granny style, both hands, slow. It went about fifteen feet and dropped in the gutter and rolled the rest of the way down by itself, and the three of them watched it like it was the funniest thing that had ever happened in Delaware County.
Grandpa watched it too. All the way to the end. He didn’t say anything.
I had his ring in one hand and my phone in the other. He’d told me not to call anybody. He hadn’t said anything about texting.
I opened the family chat and then closed it, because Uncle Darrell is in it, and texted my mom by herself.
Some guys are starting stuff with grandpa at starlite. Owners son. Hes not leaving.
It said Delivered. Then it said Read. Then my phone was buzzing in my hand before I could put it in my pocket.
I answered and turned a little away from them.
“Mom, it’s okay, I just…”
“Brooke.” She was outside somewhere, I could hear wind. “Is he hitting anybody?”
Ronnie
I didn’t know what to say to that. I looked at Grandpa.
He was standing exactly where he’d been standing. Feet together. Hands at his sides. Shirt tucked in. Grey hair combed straight back the way he’s combed it every day of my life with a black comb he keeps in his back pocket.
“No,” I said. “They are. They’re trying to.”
“Get him out of there,” Mom said. “Brooke. Listen to me. Do not let him.”
“Let him what?”
Gail had reached us. She didn’t go to Grandpa. She walked right up to Cody, who’s about a foot taller than her, and put one finger on his chest.
“Cody,” she said. “Go sit down.”
“Gail, come on.”
“I mean it. Go sit down.” She didn’t take her finger off him. “Your daddy was at the Brass Rail the night they walked this man out in handcuffs. You go ask him what it took to get them on.”
Mom was still talking in my ear. I didn’t hear any of it.
Cody looked at Grandpa. He looked him up and down. The maroon shirt with nothing on it, the grey slacks, the black comb in the back pocket.
“No shit,” Cody said. “Grandpa did time?”
“Gail,” Grandpa said.
“Don’t you Gail me.” She turned around to him then. “Deb’s not here to stand between you and nothing, Ronnie. So you think about it.”
Deb. Nobody had called Grandma Deb in front of me since the funeral.
I thought about Mom at the sink when I was twelve. I thought about him in the parking lot two Thursdays ago, a man yelling at a woman by a minivan, and how Grandpa had stopped walking and stood there with his keys until the man got in his car, and how he’d driven home without saying a word and gripped the wheel the whole way at ten and two. I thought about the ring in my hand.
And Mom said, in my ear, really clearly, “Brooke, are you hearing me?”
“I have to go,” I said, and hung up.
Grandpa looked at me for the first time since he took his ring off.
“Brookie,” he said. “Go stand by Gail.”
I didn’t go. I couldn’t make my feet do it. They were wet and they wouldn’t move.
Cody had stopped grinning. He was doing something else with his face. He looked like a guy who had just found out the game was more fun than he thought.
“Okay, jailbird,” he said. “Then you know how this goes.”
He stepped right. Shane stepped left, around the end of the ball return. The big one, Travis, I found out later, came straight up the middle, slow, like he didn’t want to but was going to.
Grandpa set his feet.
The scoring table
Shane went first. He came in low from the left, arms out, like he was going to tackle him around the waist.
Grandpa ducked under his arms and turned his hip into him and Shane went up and over. I don’t know how else to say it. He went over Grandpa’s hip like he weighed nothing and landed flat on his back on the carpet between the lanes, and all the air came out of him in one noise.
Travis grabbed at him. Got two fistfuls of the maroon shirt from behind.
Grandpa turned inside it, broke the grip with his forearms and shoved him, one big shove, both hands to the chest. Travis went backward into the bench seats, caught the back of his legs on them and went over. He came down on the other side and I heard him hit the floor behind the seats but I couldn’t see him.
Cody charged last. He came straight at him with both fists up, the way you’d come at someone in a movie.
Grandpa caught his arm. Like the first time, just caught it, out of the air. Then he turned and took Cody down across the scoring table, flat on his back, and the fries basket went everywhere and my side of the table jumped about an inch off the floor.
Cody slid off it onto the carpet and lay there.
Four seconds. Maybe five. I’ve thought about it so many times. I’ve never been able to make it longer than five.
All three of them were on their backs. Shane was looking at the ceiling and breathing like he’d run a mile. Travis was making a noise behind the seats. Cody was on the floor next to the scoring table with fries on his chest.
Nobody on lane four was talking. Nobody on lane nine. Somewhere down past lane twelve a ball came back up the return and knocked against the others, and that was the only sound in the building.
Grandpa wasn’t breathing hard. He tucked his shirt back in where Travis had pulled it out.
I was staring at him. I know I was. I had his ring in my fist so hard it left a mark.
He looked down at Cody.
“Now apologize to her,” he said.
Pendleton
It was Travis who said it.
He sat up behind the bench seats with his cap gone and his hair sticking up, and he looked at me over the back of the seats and said, “Sorry about your shoes.”
“That’s not you,” Grandpa said. “I know that’s not you.”
“Still,” Travis said.
Cody got up. He got up slow, with one hand on the scoring table, and when he was standing he wasn’t the same guy who’d been on lane seven an hour ago. His face was red all the way down his neck. He had his phone out.
“I’m calling the cops,” he said. “You hear me? You’re done. That’s assault. That’s three of us saying you came at us, and my dad’s gonna tell them exactly who you are.”
He started dialing. He was shaking so much he had to start over.
Grandpa didn’t stop him. He walked over to the bench seats and sat down on the end of them, right next to where I’d been sitting all night, and put both hands flat on his knees.
“Brookie,” he said. “Come here a second.”
I went and sat next to him. My shoes squished.
“I was twenty-two,” he said. He said it to the lane, not to me. “Your mom was three. I was working the door at the Brass Rail on Madison. Guy wouldn’t leave and I made him leave and I hurt him. More than I meant to. A lot more. I did twenty-two months in Pendleton.”
I didn’t say anything. He didn’t want me to.
“Your grandma waited. When I came home she had one rule. Thursdays I’d come here, where everybody could see me, and sit still, and drink root beer, and bowl. Thirty-three years.” He looked at his hands. “She said if I could sit still at Starlite I could sit still anywhere.”
“Grandpa.”
“If they come,” he said, “it’s three of them and my name in their computer. You understand? I’m the one they take. That’s why you don’t call.”
Behind us Cody was saying, “Yeah, hi, I’m at Starlite Lanes on Kilgore, there’s a guy who just…”
I looked at my phone. I still had it in the hand that didn’t have the ring.
The video was in my camera roll, right on top. Forty-one minutes and twelve seconds. Two games of Grandpa bowling.
I got up and walked over to Cody.
He saw me coming and put his free hand up, like I was going to do something. I didn’t. I turned the phone around and held it up in front of his face and scrubbed back to thirty-eight minutes.
There’s Grandpa on his approach. There’s Cody stepping across our line. There’s the bump, the elbow, the ball dropping in the gutter. There’s Cody turning around laughing and looking straight at the camera because he was looking straight at me, and turning his cup over, slow, the whole thing. There’s Grandpa saying apologize. There’s Cody’s fist going first.
Cody watched all of it with the phone to his ear. I could hear a woman on the other end saying, “Sir? Sir, are you still there?”
“Call them,” I said. “I’ll show them this part. I’ll start right here.”
“Delete that,” Cody said.
“No.”
“Delete it or I swear to God.”
“I saw what’s on that phone, Cody,” Gail said, from behind me. “Every bit of it. So did lane four.”
Cody looked at lane four. A dad and two kids. The dad had his arm around the smaller kid. He nodded.
Travis came around the end of the bench seats with his cap in his hand.
“Cody,” he said. “Drop it. Let’s go.”
Cody said, “Sorry, wrong number,” into his phone and hung up. Then he said, “Fuck all of you,” which was mostly for Gail, I think, and walked out. Shane went after him, still holding his back with one hand.
Travis stopped at the door and looked back at Grandpa, like he wanted to say something.
Then he pushed the glass door open and went out after them.
McGalliard Road
Mike Doyle called Gail on Saturday. Gail called Grandpa on Sunday.
Grandpa wasn’t welcome at Starlite anymore. That’s how Mike put it, according to Gail. Not welcome. He didn’t say anything about Cody.
Gail cried on the phone. Grandpa said, “It’s all right, Gail. It’s all right,” about six times, and I could hear her through the speaker from across his kitchen.
Thirty-three years on lane six. Grandma’s lane. Gone because of a guy in a tank top who thought it was funny to pour his beer on me.
Mom came over Sunday night and sat at Grandpa’s table. She looked at me and then at him.
“She knows,” Grandpa said.
“I figured,” Mom said. “I figured when she hung up on me.”
She didn’t cry. She put her hand over his on the table and they sat like that a while, and I went and washed the dishes because I didn’t know where else to be.
I never posted the video. I never sent it to the group chat. It’s still in my camera roll, forty-one minutes and twelve seconds, and I’ve never trimmed it. I don’t know why. I just haven’t.
There’s a place on McGalliard Road now. It’s bigger than Starlite and louder, and the lanes have the bumpers that come up automatically for kids, and they bring the fries in a paper boat instead of a basket. The kid at the counter doesn’t know his name. He gives us whatever lane’s open.
They don’t have root beer on tap. They have it in cans. Grandpa didn’t say anything. He just ordered the can.
Last Thursday was the third time. I wore my new shoes. The old ones are still in his garage by the door because he said the beer smell would come out eventually, and it hasn’t.
Ninth frame, second game, he was up. He picked his ball off the return, the maroon one with the chip by the thumb hole, and the ring clicked against it. He got it back on the Monday after, with dish soap.
I propped my phone against the fries.
He looked at it. Then he looked at me.
“You running that?”
“The whole thing,” I said.
“Good,” he said, and stepped up to the line.
If you’ve got a grandpa who never talks about before, take him bowling on a Thursday. He might not tell you either, but you’ll get the fries.
For more tense encounters that reveal what people carry beneath the surface, read the biker holding something he couldn’t give back and the old biker whose wallet stopped a woman in her tracks. And for another story about grief waiting just beyond the door, see the man from 4B.
