Chapter 7

The parking lot on Fifth Street holds twenty-two cars on league night if nobody parks like an idiot. At 6:20 on Thursday there was a folding table next to the Dumpster, a coffee urn I'd filled at the gas station for eleven dollars, and me, thirty weeks pregnant, in a coat over a hoodie over a hoodie, signing names in a spiral notebook by hand.

Sixty bowlers came.

They had to park on Fifth and walk. It was thirty-eight degrees with a wind off the river and the FOR SALE sign was lit up in the front window like a taillight. Nobody complained. Charlene stood at the table with the binder.

Ray Petrosky from the VFW came first and handed me a twenty and said, "I'll take two lanes."

"We can't bowl, Ray. The locks are changed."

"I know," he said. "I'll stand here and be a lane."

He stood there for three hours with his hands in his pockets like a man waiting on a bus, and by eight o'clock there were eighteen more men and women standing in that lot in the cold, not bowling, on purpose.

Somebody brought a space heater. Somebody brought a cooler. Bev came back with a tray of sloppy joes and set it on the table and said nothing to me at all, which was the kind of kindness she does.

Charlene put her hand on my back and leaned in.

"You want to keep this place?"

"More than I've ever wanted anything."

"Then next Thursday we bowl," she said. "You fix the rest."

Trent's truck never came down Fifth. I looked every twenty minutes.

Friday morning at nine I walked into the bank on Third and asked for Marisol Vega. She's fifty, careful, and she was the one who took my mother's life insurance check two years ago when I bought my third of Mabry Lanes, and she remembered the amount to the dollar. Thirty-one thousand.

"We have a dispute," she said.

"We have a forgery," I said. "October third. She signed my name. You have the page in the file."

Marisol looked at the desk blotter.

"Mrs. Mabry, I can't say anything about a customer-"

"Then just listen," I said. "Saturday. Four o'clock. In the party room at Mabry Lanes. Your name comes up in it, and I'd rather you hear it from a speaker than from somebody's cousin."

Her pen stopped.

"In what."

"Saturday," I said.

I was halfway to the door when she said, "I'll listen. On the phone. I'm not sitting in a room with that family."

"Phone's fine."

I got back to the alley at ten and stood in the lot looking at the FOR SALE sign in my own window, and at 10:12 my replacement phone buzzed with a number I didn't have saved and a message that said: Twenty thousand. Walk away. You've got a baby to think about.

No name. No name needed.

I stood in that cold parking lot for a long time with my thumb on the screen, and I want to be honest about what I thought about, because I'm going to have to live with it.

I thought about the twenty thousand. I thought about signing the note and slipping out from under all of it. I thought about how easy it would be to write Rennie a check she couldn't cover and let her find out who really owns the night drop.

I typed back: Come to the party room Saturday at four and say that in front of my husband.

Then I wrote in the spiral notebook, in the back where I keep the numbers that aren't real yet, the words: DO NOT BECOME HER.

Saturday, four o'clock.