‘You would be very sorry if you never bowled,’ he told me, holding out the ball he’d picked out for me. ‘Here.’ I took the ball, putting my fingers in the holes the way he showed me. Then he gestured for me to follow him to the top of the lane. ‘Now, when I was a kid,’ he said, ‘we learned by squatting down and just pushing the ball forward with both hands.’
I looked down the lanes on either side of us, which were empty, as it was two A.M. The only people around were sitting up at the bar behind us, which was barely visible due to a fog of cigarette smoke. ‘I’m not squatting down,’ I said firmly.
‘Fine. Then you have to learn the proper release.’ He lifted his hands, holding an imaginary ball, then stepped forward, lowering it to his side, and then ahead of him, opening his fingers. ‘Like that. Okay?’
‘Okay.’
I lifted up the ball. He didn’t move, still standing right beside me. I shot him a look and he shrugged, retreating back to the sticky bench.
Since our first night out together a week earlier, this was pretty much how it had been. A constant back-and-forth, sometimes serious, more often not, stretched out across the hours between when everyone else went home and the sun came up. I knew if I’d spent the same amount of time with Eli during the day, or even early evening, I probably would have gotten to know him, too. But not like this. The night changed things, widening out the scope. What we said to each other, the things we did, they all took on a bigger meaning in the dark. Like time was sped up and slowed down, all at once.
So maybe that was why we always seemed to be talking about time as we wandered the aisles of stores under fluorescent lights, or drank coffee in a dark room while his clothes fluffed, or just drove through the mostly empty streets, en route to somewhere. Time ahead, like college, and behind, like childhood. But mostly, we discussed making up for lost time, if such a thing was possible. Eli seemed to think it was, at least in my case.
‘You know what they say,’ he’d said to me a few nights earlier, as we helped ourselves to Slurpees at the Gas/Gro around three A.M. ‘It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.’
I picked up a straw, poking down the pink slush in my cup. ‘I wouldn’t say my childhood was unhappy, though. It just wasn’t…’
Eli waited, fitting a lid onto his cup with a click.
‘… very childlike,’ I finished. I took a sip of my Slurpee, then added a bit of blue flavor for variety, a trick he’d taught me a few nights before. ‘My brother had kind of worn my parents out on the whole kid thing. They didn’t have the patience to do it again.’
‘But you were a kid,’ he pointed out.
‘I was,’ I agreed. ‘But in their minds, that was something I could overcome, if I just tried hard enough.’
He gave me one of the looks I’d come to recognize, his expression a mix of befuddlement and respect. You kind of had to see it to understand. Then he said, ‘In our house, it was the total opposite. Kid central, all the time.’
‘Really.’
‘Yup. You know how there’s one house in the neighborhood where everyone goes to ride bikes, or watch cartoons, or sleep over, or build a tree house?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. Then I added, ‘I mean, I’ve heard of such things.’
‘That was our place. Because there were four of us, we were always halfway to any game of kickball or dodgeball. Plus my mom was always around, so we had the best snacks. Her pizza wraps were legendary.’
‘Wow,’ I said, following him up to the register. The cashier, the older woman I’d come to recognize, looked up from her magazine, smiling at him as she rung us up. ‘Your mom sounds great.’
‘She is.’ He said this so simply, matter-of-factly, as he pushed a couple of bills across to the cashier. ‘She’s so good it’s hard for her to convince anyone to move out. It took her forever to get rid of my sister and older brother. And Jake’s the baby, and totally spoiled, so she’s probably stuck with him until some girl is stupid enough to marry him.’
Hearing this, I felt my face flush, remembering our fast, fumbled moment in the dunes. I swallowed, focusing on Wanda as I paid for my Slurpee.
It wasn’t until we were headed outside that he said suddenly, ‘Look, no offense. I mean, about what I said. About Jake. I know you two –’
‘I’m not offended,’ I said, cutting him off before he could begin to try and define this. ‘Just humiliated.’
‘We don’t have to talk about it.’
‘Good.’ I took a long draw off my straw. We walked in silence to the car, but then I said, ‘In my defense, though, I don’t have a lot of experience with, um, guys. So that was…’
‘You don’t have to explain,’ he said, opening his door. ‘Really. My brother is a piece of work. Let’s just leave it at that.’
I smiled gratefully, as I slid into the front seat. ‘I have one of those, too. A piece-of-work brother. Except he’s in Europe, where he’s been mooching off my parents for a couple of years now.’
‘You can mooch from overseas?’
‘Hollis can,’ I told him. ‘He’s got it down to an art form, practically.’
Eli considered this as we stepped out into the hot, windy night. ‘Seems kind of selfish,’ he observed. ‘Considering he got the only childhood.’
I hadn’t ever thought of it that way. ‘Well, like you said. Maybe it’s not too late. For my happy childhood, and all.’