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“It’s plenty fancy.” He studies the carpet, which is covered in neon pins, yellow stars, and bowling balls with smiling faces. “I’m considering this pattern for one of my hotels.”
“Maybe your newest one.”
He laughs and I lead him to the shoe counter.
“What size are you?”
“Twelve.”
“An eight and a twelve, please,” I tell the woman behind the counter.
She places two pairs of red-and-white shoes in front of us, and we sit on a bench to change.
When Eric stands, I take in the dark suit, open collar, and bright rental shoes.
I can’t help it. I start laughing.
“What?”
“You look ridiculous.”
His attention drops to my dress and the matching shoes on my feet. “You’re hardly in a position to judge.”
I look down. He’s right, which only makes me laugh harder.
Still shaking his head, Eric rolls his sleeves, then walks to the ball rack beside our lane. After testing the weight and finger holes of several balls, he chooses a dark-blue one.
He turns to me. “Alright, Hartwell. Let’s see what you can do.”
By the final frame of our seventh game, nearly three hours have passed. Eric won the first six and is well on his way to winning the seventh. He sends another ball down the lane. It curves at the last second and strikes the pins with a sharp crack, sending all ten to the floor.
Eric turns as the last pin falls. The smug look on his face makes me want to throw something at him. He returns to our table while the machine resets the pins for my final turn. When he sits, his knee brushes mine.
“You were saying something about an ice machine?” I ask.
Before his shot, we were trading stories about learning to run our hotels. Eric told me about a coastal Voss property that kept getting complaints about an ice machine beside one of the guest rooms. The manager dismissed them, and soon bad reviews began appearing online. Several calls from the corporate office changed nothing, so Eric’s father sent him to handle the problem himself.
“My father said that if I expected to run the company one day, I needed to understand how quickly a small problem could become an expensive one.”
“So you went all the way there for an ice machine?”
“The manager claimed the guests were exaggerating, so I stayed in the room myself.”
“And?”
“Every eleven minutes, the machine groaned, and dropped a fresh load of ice.”
“How long did you last?”
“Fifty-five minutes before I considered removing every ice machine from every Voss hotel.”
“Seems reasonable.”
“I wasn’t thinking clearly by then.”
An impatient beep pulls me back to the game. My name is flashing across the scoring screen.
Eric gestures toward it. “I believe you’re being summoned.”
