It’s cool this place reopened. It was a staple hangout in our youths, but I heard it was shut down for a while, foreclosed on by the same bank that had jacked up the rates and fucked over most of the residents and businesses of the Heights and tanked our local economy. Rory’s worked hard to get this place, and a bunch of others, reopened, better than before.
“Looks good,” I tell my brother, eyeing the restored bowling alley.
What used to be wood-paneled walls are now covered in a rustic reclaimed wood, with the alley’s logo burned into the far wall, several feet wide, as a focal point.
This is one place I didn’t have to paint hardly anything in, mostly just the back offices. The rest is done in that old barn wood, kinda like the bar is.
“She did good,” he says, and that scruffy face of his can’t hide the way the corner of his mouth tilts up, the way it only does for her.
Apparently, ever since its grand reopening last month, it’s been pretty packed out, especially on Saturday nights like these. The people of our town have somewhere to go, soon to be lots of places to go. Hell, word on the street is we’ll even have somewhere to eat soon. A regular ole mini New York City, that’s what Rory is turning us into. Spoiled for options.
All right, maybe that’s a little heavy-handed on the sunny optimism, even for me. But the town is definitely waking up, turning into somewhere with something for just about everyone.
Standing by the ball return, I wait for my green and white marbled bowling ball to come back to me, after Wyatt just sunk his plain, boring black one down the right-hand side of the lane, only hitting four pins and cursing the shot.
With a series of rolling clunks, it appears in the mouth of the machine, and I grab it and decide to throw with my eyes closed.
“Look, Ma!” I yell to my brother. “No eyes!”
My arm pulls back and swings through, releasing the ball on muscle memory, and I open my eyes to watch it knock down the entire middle section of the pins. Seven and ten are holding on, teetering, and I cheer them on.
“Go down! Down, bitches!”
The universe loves me, and they topple with my encouragement. Or it could’ve been the other pins, still spinning on the ground, that knocked them over. Either way, I’ll take it.
I turn around with a grin and a wink, and my brother is scoffing.
“You did not just do that with your eyes closed,” he refutes.
“Are you calling me a liar or a cheater?” I put up fisticuffs, bouncing in place, laughing at the exchange.
Wyatt does something like an eye roll and blows out a heavy breath.
“You’re an absolute idiot. I’m still convinced the stork dropped you off when Mom was out at the store or something. There’s no way we’re closely related.”
I bump him with my shoulder. “I know. It makes no sense. If we were, you’d be so much more handsome and radiant.”
Wyatt shoves me away from his personal space, but there isn’t heat behind it. It’s his version of playful.
I drop back into the shitty plastic bench seats that line the lane (they couldn’t have upgraded those to something nicer? Plush couches, maybe?) and pick my beer back up, nursing it with a sigh.
My brother doesn’t get up to bowl his turn. Instead, he stays there, ass planted on the bench behind the input for the scoreboard, watching me, beer dangling from his grip.
“How’s life, West?” It’s an uncharacteristic question for him, with genuine interest behind it.
I give him the answer I always give everyone, usually our mother. “It’s good. Things are good.” The automatic response leaves my mouth without thought, despite the twinge of longing in me for something more. A driving purpose in life, someone who makes everything else in this world make sense. Something that anchors me, gives me a reason to stop floating on by, existing in the moment and reallylive.
But that longing has been there since I hit puberty, since I saw my brother find his purpose in Rory. If the universe really loved me, wouldn’t it have led me to her by now? My person?
By twenty-one, I doubted she was in the Heights.
By my mid-twenties, I doubted any part of my future was in the Heights, that there even was someone for me at all, and I hit the road to stop the constant reminders of it.
Sure, my brother was a miserable fuck while his girl was gone, but at least he knew what it was like to love someone as much as he did.
I spent those years wondering if I was just broken, incapable of a serious feeling toward another human being.
Eventually, I just steered into the skid and kept it casual with everyone, never expecting sparks to fly or for deeper feelings to emerge. Harder to be disappointed that way every time they don’t come.
