“…something on it about Mom that you do not know,” Mike said again, and his voice cracked in the middle of the word, the way it had when he was fourteen. He stood in the doorway of Strike Zone Lanes in his overcoat with his phone in one hand and the other held out for the cassette, as if he were reaching for a loaded gun. I did what I had not done to my son in fifty five years. I put my hand over his and pushed it gently down. “Michael,” I said, “you are going to sit on that stool, and we are going to listen to it together.”
Josh found an old answering machine in the back office, one of the kind with the little cassettes, and set it on the bar between the pretzel bowls. Mike sat on the stool like a boy waiting for the principal. Josh went to stand by the door. I pushed the cassette into the slot and pressed play, and the speaker crackled, and out of it came the voice of my son at twenty six years old, shaking, a little drunk, speaking into a machine on a night in 1997, to his mother. “Mom. It is me. I know you are not home.”
The voice went on. “Mom, I put all of it back. Every dollar I took. I wrapped it in the deposit bags like you said, and I wired the box inside the machine, behind the sweep bar, and nobody will ever find it. I am going to pay the money back a little at a time, and Dad will never know. I swear on Grandpa. And Mom, I am sorry about the doctor. I am so sorry. Please, please tell Dad about the lump before the surgery. Do not do this alone.”
A cassette in a metal box wired inside Lane 9, and a son who wanted it back before anyone pressed play.
The tape clicked off. The only sound in Strike Zone was the compressor on the beer cooler. I looked at Mike. He had his face in his hands. “Dottie had a lump?” I said. He nodded. “In the spring of 1997, Pop. Stage one. Mom found it herself in the shower. She had the surgery in May and six weeks of treatment. She made me swear not to tell you. She said you were already wearing yourself out over the mortgage, and she would not pile her sickness on top of it.”
I thought of that spring. I remembered Dottie taking the job at the hospital, saying she was bored, and the days she came home pale and tired and said it was the lunch shift. I thought of the long baths. I thought of the scarf she wore for a few weeks in June, and how I had said it was pretty. I had been bowling with the Tuesday league. I had never once asked. “She went back to work,” Mike said, “because the hospital had insurance. We had cancelled ours in 1996, Pop. You did not know that either. Mom did it to save the premium.”
I sat on the barstool and let it come. Fifty one years, and she had still been keeping secrets from me, out of love. It was the most Dottie thing in the world. I was furious at her, and I missed her so badly that I put my hand flat over my mouth. Mike sat beside me. After a while he said, “Pop, the dollar thing, the storage units. It was stupid. I was scared. I knew any renovation would find that box. I did not want you to know I had taken the money. I wanted to fix it before the new owners did.”
“How much did you take, Michael?” I asked. “A hundred forty thousand dollars,” he said. “Over fourteen months. I owed a bookie on Parade Street. I was twenty five, and I was an idiot.” He looked at me finally. His eyes were red. “I have been trying to pay it back my whole life. I sent Mom a thousand dollars every year for twenty years. She kept it in a coffee can in the cellar. I never told you. I did not know how.” I put my arm around my fifty five year old son, who smelled of cold air and aftershave, and I held him.
For a long moment neither of us said anything. Then I stood and walked down the lanes in my socks, past the shoe racks and the old scoreboard, all the way to Lane 9. The pinsetter was gone, taken apart in pieces, and the crew of the new owners had stopped work and stood by the wall with their caps in their hands. I stood at the foul line and looked down the polished boards. “Josh,” I said, “can I ask you something? Could you leave this lane exactly as it is?” Josh said, “Mr. Kowalski, we already decided.”
They did it. Lane 9 is the only lane in Strike Zone that is not neon. Wood, brass, an old scoreboard, and a small brass plaque on the ball return: Dottie Lane. Where she laughed so hard she fell down. I gave the box of deposit bags to the children hospital on Peach Street, in Dottie name, along with the coffee can money. Mike did not ask me to. He stood there with his hat in his hands and said, “Thank you, Pop.” That was all.
On the first Sunday after the grand opening, Mike picked up a ball on Lane 9, the first ball he had thrown in thirty years. He took two steps, swung, and released, and the ball veered at once into the gutter. He turned around, red faced, and laughed so hard he fell down on the boards. I walked over in my socks, and I held out my hand, and I helped him up. Just as I had once helped his mother. “She would have loved that,” Mike said. “She does,” I said.
