Lane 7 Anniversary

You know how you get talked into a thing? That was me, three weeks ago, saying yes to Blair's dad's anniversary party without really thinking about it. Fifty years of marriage! Who says no to that?

So that's how I ended up at The Spare Room on a Tuesday night, alone, in upstate New Keller, watching a kitchen go dark.

Let me back up. I'm Angela, I'm thirty-two, I work as a curator at this tiny contemporary art space that pays me just enough to keep renting. Blair's my oldest friend from the city days, and her parents, Rudy and Dot, have run this retro bowling alley diner on the closed stretch of Route 9 since before I was born. The whole place smells like fryer oil and old varnish and there's a lane out back that hasn't worked since the nineties. It's kind of perfect, honestly.

The plan was that Blair and I would sit together, catch up, gossip, the usual. Then Blair got a work call that morning, something about a client in Chicago, and she flew out same day. Her text said "so sorry!! cover for me, tell mom and dad I love them!!" with like four crying emojis. So there I was at a table for six by myself, sipping a ginger ale and making small talk with her uncle Ray about gutters.

The party was actually really sweet. Rudy gave a speech about the day they opened, and Dot cried a little, and everyone pretended their food was great even though the mashed potatoes were clearly from a box. Then the lights dimmed for the cake and I thought, oh, this is gonna be nice, they even turned things down on purpose.

Except then the whole kitchen went dark. Not dim. Dark. The refrigerator hum stopped, the fryer stopped, everything stopped. Somebody screamed, then laughed, then everybody started talking at once.

"Nobody panic!" Rudy shouted, which made everyone panic more. "It's the breaker. Niko's looking at it."

Niko, the cook, was already cursing in the kitchen doorway with a flashlight. The cake sat there on the counter looking sad and frosted and unreachable, because apparently the electric candles were also electric.

So the party kind of dissolved into clusters. People moved toward the windows for the last of the daylight, and the bar side got louder, and I got up from my big empty table and did a lap. That's when Garret found me.

* * *

"Is this seat taken?"

I looked up and there he was, holding two bottles of beer, both unopened, one sweating on his wrist. Garret. Blair's roommate. The drummer from that band he's been in forever, the one I have definitely not been quietly into for like four years, nope, not at all.

"Garret. Hi. No, sit, please, I was holding down a fortress all by myself."

"Wow, look at this ambiance," he said, sliding in across from me and setting the beers down. "Candlelit dinner at a bowling alley. Very romantic. Should I be nervous?"

"You should be worried the candles don't work either. They're fake candles. Even the fake fire is broken."

"Tragic," he said, and pushed one beer toward me. "Here. I took two from the ice bucket before the stampede. I figured one of us would want it, and statistically it was gonna be you because Ray drinks white wine and everyone else here is related to each other."

"You know me so well." I took it. He twisted the cap off his own against the edge of the table, which he did every single time and which I always watched a little too closely. "Did Blair tell you she bailed?"

"She told me this morning. I offered to house-sit and she said, quote, 'you'll eat all my good snacks,' which, fair."

"That is completely true. You ate my brie at the gallery thing in June and you know it."

"That brie was unattended." He held his hands up like I was arresting him. "Unattended cheese is fair game. That's the law."

I laughed way harder than that joke deserved, which is sort of my whole problem around him. So here's the deal, reader, since Blair would just tell you anyway: I have liked this man for years. Never said anything. He's my best friend's roommate, I see him maybe six times a year, and every single time I go home and tell myself next time, next time I'll say something, and then I get drunk on two beers and talk about art grants instead. Thirty-two years old and I still do this.

"How's the band?" I asked. "You guys play anywhere lately?"

"We got a residency at that bar in Kingston, Thursdays in November. Which is basically the universe telling us nobody wants to see a drummer on a Thursday."

"I would come see you on a Thursday."

"Yeah?" He smiled and something in my chest did a thing. "You never came to one before."

"I came to two."

"You came to one. The one where the power also went out, funnily enough, and we played acoustic on the patio."

"That was a great show, actually."

"It was a disaster," he said, grinning. "But a great disaster."

And then, because the universe has a sense of humor, my eyes wandered past his shoulder to the shelf behind the counter. You know how old bowling alleys have stuff everywhere, trophies and photos and junk? Well, on the shelf above the register there was a whole row of engraved bowling balls, the novelty kind with names in them. There was a Catalina, and a Big Mike, and then one right in the middle, pretty and swirly and purple, that said LATISHA.

And Garret's face changed.

It wasn't big. His smile just kind of shut off, as if a breaker had tripped, ha, like the kitchen. He went quiet mid-sentence about the residency and looked at his beer.

"Garret?" I said. "You okay?"

"Huh? Yeah. Sorry." He glanced back at the shelf, then at me, and made a little face. "That's, uh. That's a story."

I felt my stomach drop in this specific way I don't love admitting to. Because here's what I thought I knew: Blair had mentioned, ages ago, that Garret's ex was named Latisha. Three-year relationship, ended two years ago, amicable. And I had built an entire quiet little wall in my head around that name. Latisha exists, therefore Garret is maybe still hung up on Latisha, therefore Angela, do not be an idiot about Garret. I'd been careful for two years because of a woman I'd never met.

"That's her, isn't it," I said, trying to sound casual and probably failing. "Your ex."

"What?" He turned and actually looked at the ball this time, then did a weird little laugh. "Oh. Oh no, is that what you think?"

"Well, I mean. Blair said..."

"Blair's got it wrong, actually." He turned back around and rubbed his thumb down the side of the bottle, frowning at it the way he does when he's organizing a thought. "Okay. So. Latisha. Yes, I dated a Latisha, three years, ended two years back, all that's true. But that's not this Latisha."

"There's two Latishas?"

"There's two Latishas, and it's the funniest thing that's ever happened to me, so let me tell it right." He took a sip and set the bottle down. "This one, ball Latisha, was a one-time thing. One gig, maybe seven years ago now, up in Hudson. She played bass in the opening band. We hit it off, we went bowling the next day, only date we ever had. She bowled a 147, which is honestly better than me, and she was so smug about it that Rudy, who was working the counter that night, engraved her a ball as a joke. Her name right on it. Put it up on the shelf."

"That's... actually the sweetest thing I've ever heard."

"Right? And then she got a tour gig with somebody's cover band and went off to play Wisconsin or somewhere, and we texted for like two weeks and that was it. Total fling. But the ball stays, because Rudy says once a ball's engraved it's history. It's not mine to take down."

"So she's basically a bowling legend."

"Basically. 147 at Lane 7. Forever." He was smiling again, that real one, and something loose was unknotting in my chest that I hadn't even realized was tied. "You thought I was sitting here pining over a bowling ball of my ex?"

"I thought no such thing."

"You had a whole face going. You had the curator face."

"I do not have a curator face."

"Angela. You have a face you make at art you're not going to say is bad but also isn't making the cut. You just made it at a bowling ball."

I was laughing and also blushing, and the weird thing was I wasn't even embarrassed about the right thing. I wasn't embarrassed about the face. I was embarrassed because two years of careful, and it turns out the careful was about nothing. There was a whole Latisha-shaped wall in my head and it was made of somebody else's bowling souvenir.

"So wait," I said, leaning forward on my elbows. "If ball Latisha isn't the ex, then tell me about the actual ex. Because now I feel like I've had bad intel this whole time."

He raised his eyebrows at me over his beer. "The whole time, huh? You've had intel?"

"Blair talks. You know how she talks."

"Oh, I know how she talks." He was giving me this look, this slow half-smile, and the bar noise kind of faded out around us. "Well. What do you want to know?"

"So the actual ex," I said. "Latisha number one. Three years. That was serious, right?"

"Yeah, that was serious. We lived together for a chunk of it, actually, over in Poughkeepsie. It was good, and then it was done, and it was about as clean as those things get." He shrugged. "She's getting married in the spring. I'm going. She asked me to DJ the after party."

"Wait, seriously? She asked you to DJ her wedding?"

"I'm cheap and I own speakers. It's basically a friendship."

I sat there and did some math I didn't want to do out loud. Because if the ex was genuinely in the past, if there was no wall, then the wall had been mine. Mine and mine alone, two stories tall, load... no, not that word, but you know what I mean. It was holding up nothing.

"Okay, so can I confess something dumb?" I said. "And you're not allowed to make the face I just made."

"I make no promises."

"For like two years I've had you filed as, I don't know, taken in spirit. Off the board. The one who got away, except you were never even mine to get away, you were just... gone. Filed under serious girlfriend, do not touch."

He blinked at me. Then he laughed, this full-body thing that made a couple of the old regulars at the counter look over, and he had to put his beer down.

"The one who got away." He wiped at his eye. "Angela, I've been at your gallery thing in June eating your brie, and I texted you memes at like one in the morning last week, and you thought I was off the board?"

"You never corrected the record."

"How would I even correct it? Hey Angela, quick