Stolen Night, Bittersweet Love

I got to Strike & Spare a little after seven, which in Midwest bowling terms means I was early. The parking lot was packed and there was a guy in a referee striped shirt directing traffic like it was the Super Bowl. League finals night. Naomi had texted me twice, don't be late and seriously don't be late, so of course I sat in my Corolla for ten minutes finishing a podcast chapter first.

Inside it was loud. Beer pins, high fives, a kid behind the counter who had to be at least twenty-one but looked twelve handing out score sheets. I scanned the lanes and found her on sixteen, doing that little hop she does before she throws. Naomi is thirty-one, has these strong shoulders from carrying tax boxes around every April, and when she's focused she sticks her tongue out the corner of her mouth. She stuck it out, threw, and got a strike. The whole end of the alley went up. She turned around scanning the crowd, found me, and waved both arms like she was flagging down a plane.

"You came!" She jogged over and hugged me, smelling like bowling alley and the coconut lotion I bought her. "I thought you'd bail, you've been working doubles."

"Pharmacists don't bail on anniversaries," I said. "We clock out late and then show up."

"Six months," she said, holding up fingers. "Today. Can you believe it."

Six months since we got back together, after a year apart and two and a half years since we first met at that pharmacy school mixer where she was the only tax person in a room full of people arguing about statins. I could believe it and I also couldn't.

She leaned in close, and I mean close, mouth near my ear, which is not where you stand in a bowling alley full of your league friends unless you're up to something. "I booked us a room," she whispered. "Lane View Inn, right across the street. Room with the good window. After this we're disappearing and nobody can say a word about it."

"Naomi, you hate that hotel."

"I hate their breakfast. I don't hate their beds. It's one night, it's our anniversary, and it's twenty feet from here so we're not driving anywhere after I drink two beers." She kissed my cheek and went back to her lane like she hadn't just planned an entire evening in my ear.

The trouble started around frame nine. She came back from the desk with her jaw set in that way she gets, the customer-service-voice way.

"So," she said, sitting down hard next to me. "Small problem. They gave our room away."

"Gave it away?"

"Double-booked. There's some team party, the Pin Pals or whatever, and the manager says their fax system printed everything out of order and our confirmation got buried. He was very sorry. He had a clipboard. I wanted to hit him with the clipboard."

"So what do we do?"

"We still have two frames and a trophy ceremony, and then I guess we go to my apartment like animals and listen to the neighbor's dog." She sighed and picked up her ball. "I had a whole plan. Candles. I bought candles, Lindsey."

I watched her walk off to throw. Then, because I had nothing better to do than stand at the counter feeling sorry for us, I leaned on it and looked around. The counter was a disaster. Faxes everywhere, stacked up like somebody had been shoveling them into a pile. Faxed reservation confirmations, most of them from that same week, all curling at the edges.

And one of them, crumpled in a ball near the register like trash, had our names on it.

I am not above going through a bowling alley's garbage when my anniversary is on the line. I picked it up and flattened it out against the counter. Naomi F., party of two, room 114, king bed, confirmed, dated eleven days ago. Signed by the manager's own fax confirmation stamp. The room they gave away was not, according to this piece of paper, given away. The Pin Pals were booked into 116. Somebody at the front desk could not read.

Naomi came back from her last frame, which she threw a strike on, because of course she did, her team was going to win. I held the fax up.

"Naomi. Look."

She read it twice. "Where did you."

"It was in a ball on the counter. It's ours. Room 114. The Pin Pals are in 116. Your room exists."

"You went through their garbage."

"I rescued their garbage. There's a difference and the difference is we have a hotel room."

She grabbed the fax, kissed me fast in front of everybody, which got a whoop from her teammate Denise, and then had to go stand for the trophy ceremony because the team won and she's a good sport. So I stood there through the whole thing, through the little plastic trophy and the team photo and Denise yelling, while Naomi kept catching my eye across the room and grinning.

The second it was polite, we slipped out the door. Crossed the street. The Lane View Inn lobby smelled like old carpet, and the night manager, a guy maybe in his fifties watching a small TV behind the desk, looked up like we'd woken him.

"Checking in, Naomi Fetter," she said, sliding her card over. "Room 114. It's on your confirmations, I promise."

He looked at his pile, which was genuinely enormous, found the fax we handed him, squinted at it, and handed over a key card without one further word. I appreciated that about him.

The room was musty in the way rooms are when nobody's stayed in them for a while, and the window looked right out at the Strike & Spare sign, which flickered pink and buzzed, throwing