I slammed the medicine cabinet shut. Managing the restaurant these last few weeks had opened my eyes to all the petty grievances the workers nursed toward one another: Veronica didn’t like Rafi, who had a crush on Renata, who was sleeping with José, who thought Marty was out to get him. I couldn’t keep up. I walked back to the dining room, where a couple with three young children was being seated, the toddler screaming, refusing to sit in the high chair. My head throbbed.
I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down at the counter to drink it. The night before, Jeremy and I had stayed up late talking, and I had gotten little sleep. I didn’t know why I was spending so much time with him. He wasn’t the sweet kid I knew in high school; he had fought in a brutal war, a war I hated. Hearing about the terrible things he had seen or done in Iraq made me feel implicated, something I hadn’t grasped until it was too late. I didn’t know how to navigate back to my state of ignorance. There was no map I could follow.
I was taking the trash out to the dumpster later that morning when I saw a blue station wagon pull up in front of Desert Arcade. The car had a broken taillight, a yellow ribbon decal on the back window, and a bumper sticker that said PROUD PARENT OF AN HONOR ROLL STUDENT. A family of four got out. Father, mother, two girls. “Mommy, can I get a Skittles from the machine?” the older girl asked. Her hair was plaited and pinned on top of her head, in a style that made her look like a milkmaid. The younger girl had dark hair and walked blindly behind, her eyes never leaving the comic book she was reading.
A happy family.
I was so drawn to them that when they went into the bowling alley, I followed. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to Desert Arcade’s dimly lit lobby. A floor-to-ceiling advertisement for Budweiser Beer was pasted on the far wall, though its colors had dulled with age and one of its corners was peeling. On the stereo, the chorus of a pop ballad I didn’t recognize was playing at top volume. A huge flag hung over the front counter, where the family stood, waiting for bowling shoes. When they ambled away to their lane, the clerk turned to me. “Can I help you?”
The sound of a pin strike drew my gaze to the bowling area. In one of the farther lanes, two older men, their sunglasses resting on the visors of their baseball caps, were looking up at the screen for their scores. The family of four had just sat down in lane 5, and the father was entering names in the machine, while the mother helped the girls choose bowling balls.
“Can I help you?” the clerk said again.
I turned back to say no, that I was about to leave, but then I saw A.J. standing next to the concession stand at one end of the concourse. He was speaking on his cell phone, but his eyes were fixed on me. Did he work at the bowling alley now? He certainly looked it, in his black polo shirt and name tag. Perhaps he was taking over the business from his father, just as I was taking over the restaurant from my dad. My skin broke into goose bumps. It’s just the air conditioning, I told myself, that’s all it is. I wasn’t sixteen anymore, A.J. didn’t scare me.
“Can I help you?”
“Yes,” I said. “Can I buy a game, please?”
“What size shoe?”
“Seven.”
“Here you go. Lane 3.”
I paid and took the red-and-blue bowling shoes to my lane. I didn’t have socks, and the insoles of the shoes felt rough and scratchy. No matter. I tied the shoelaces and stood up. Nearly all the bowling balls on the rack were too heavy for me, but I chose one anyway, for its color, a deep red. Walking to the foul line, I threw the ball down the lane. It fell with a loud thud and ended up in the gutter. The next ball missed, too, and the one after that, but I persisted, and eventually I hit one pin.
“Nora.”
I turned around to find A.J. standing not five feet from me. He fixed me with a stare that pinned me to the spot. Time stopped. It seemed to me as if we were in that school hallway again, me standing at my locker, the slur scribbled in blue, and him with his arm around Stacey Briggs. The other students walked hurriedly past on their way to class. No one came to my side, no word was spoken in my defense.
“You’re doing it all wrong,” A.J. said in a measured voice. “You need to straighten your wrist. Let me show you.”
He picked up a bowling ball and placed it in my hands, maneuvering my fingertips into the holes, first my thumb, and then my ring and middle fingers. The resin was dry and as he pushed my fingers into the ball, it scraped my skin painfully. Fear and revulsion raced inside me. “The trick,” he was saying as he gripped my hand and mimed swinging the ball, “is to keep your hand straight, otherwise when you pitch the ball, the arc is off.” He was so close I could feel his hot breath against my neck. My pulse quickened. I managed to free myself from his grip and, with all the power I could muster, pitched the ball down the lane. It hit four pins.
“See? That’s much better already,” he said.
The sweeping bar cleared the fallen pins and reset those that remained. A.J. walked up to the foul line with a new ball, a blue fifteen-pounder. He raised it to his chest for a moment and then, with a fluid but powerful movement of the wrist, released it down the lane. The remaining pins fell in a clatter. He turned to me. “Like that.” Then he smiled. “Enjoy the rest of your game.”
I waited until he’d walked away, then went to the counter, turned in my shoes, and rushed back to the safety of the Pantry. My heart was beating so fast I had to sit on the wooden bench at the entrance. That was where Veronica found me a moment later. “I have something for you,” she said, brandishing a bottle of Ibuprofen.
“You’re a lifesaver,” I said, taking it from her and walking to the counter for a tall glass of water.
“Rafi had it stashed in his cupboard.”
“I’m sure he just forgot to put it back.”
She gave me a look that said I was na?ve, but maybe someday I’d come around.
A.J.
I couldn’t wrestle in this town, not seriously anyway, so I ended up spending all my free time with my collies, Gordon and Annie. I walked them, played with them, taught them how to steer clear of rattlesnakes and scorpions, and sometimes after I got home from work, I took them out to my parents’ backyard and trained them to gait properly. I was seriously considering showing them, the way my mom and I did when I was a kid. I’d loved traveling to different parts of California with her, taking care of the dogs, watching them compete. We made the perfect team: my mom would fill out the paperwork and talk to the handlers and breeders and judges, and I would groom the collies and keep them company until the show.
One time, we traveled all the way up to Fresno for an AKC competition. It was the farthest we’d gone from home, but we thought it was worth it because our dog Royal was doing so well that year that he had a good chance at winning first prize. A lot of people watch conformation shows on television and think that winning is about appearance, but the truth is that it’s about much more than that. A dog can look great and never win, because aside from appearance and behavior, what the judges are really looking for is purity, the kind of traits that will be passed down the line to the offspring. Not that appearance doesn’t matter. Of course it does. It was my job to make sure Royal looked perfect, that his fur was smooth and shiny, his ears clean, his teeth bright, all of that. When he won Best of Breed at the Fresno show, I felt as if I had won something myself, that’s how much work I put into it.
But late that Sunday night, when we came back home, my dad was waiting up for us. I remember that David Letterman was on TV, and that the volume was cranked all the way up, because my dad was starting to lose some of his hearing.
“We won,” I hollered, just so he could hear me over the sound of the Top 10 List, and held up Royal’s first-place ribbon as if for proof.
My dad turned off the TV and struggled out of the armchair. He was a big guy, and he had to look down to meet my mom’s eyes. “Do you know what time it is?” he asked her.
“We didn’t leave Fresno until late,” she said. She put down her purse on the coffee table and unzipped her fleece jacket, but didn’t take it off. It was a cold night in February, and my dad hadn’t turned on the heater. He was cheap like that.