Chapter 8

Dale Skaggs came at four and stood the whole time. He didn't take a chair and he didn't take his coat off and he looked around the party room like a man appraising a barn.

Rennie came at ten after, with the manila envelope in her tote and her hair done, and stopped in the doorway when she saw him.

Charlene sat at the end of the first table with her tablet and a speaker the size of a coffee cup. Marisol Vega was on the phone on the table, speaker on, muted, and we all knew it and pretended we didn't.

Trent stood by the trophy shelf with his arms crossed.

Rennie did exactly what I thought she'd do. She walked in, put the envelope on the table, opened it, and slid the sale agreement toward Trent with her finger on my forged signature.

"He signed nothing," she said. "Della's the one who won't sign. She's been holding this building hostage for a year over a piece of paper. That's the whole story."

Nobody said anything.

"So that's what we're doing?" She looked around the room. "Four o'clock on a Saturday for this?"

"Sit down, Rennie," Charlene said.

"I'm not-"

"Rennie," I said. "Look at the tablet."

Charlene had it open. She turned it so Rennie could see, and she hit play.

The party room. Empty. One tube flickering. Rain on the roof like static.

Rennie Mabry comes through the doorway backward, dragging the gray mat by the corner. She lays it in the doorway. She kneels down and flattens it with both hands, rubber-side down, smooth-side up.

Then she walks to the middle of the room and says, "She came at me first. She came at me first, and I put my hands up."

Rennie lunged for the laptop.

I had it off the table before her hands closed, one arm around the screen, and Charlene was up out of her chair shouting, and Skaggs caught Rennie by the jacket with one hand and set her back down in the chair like a bag of groceries, and Marisol Vega's line went absolutely silent on the table in a way that meant a woman in a bank on Third was listening to everything.

"Play the next one," I said.

Charlene jumped to 9:20.

The lane lights go down. The ball returns quit. Trent Mabry walks the dark floor with his key ring and locks the front door of his own business and kills the lot lights, and a woman's voice beside the microphone says, "Lock up early. I don't want anybody wandering in," and a man says, "Yeah."

Trent didn't move. He stood there with his hand gripping the trophy shelf and he didn't move and he didn't say a word, and I watched the last person in that room who was still on his sister's side stop being on his sister's side, and it cost him everything he had.

"Nine thirty-one," I said.

Charlene jumped.

Rennie's voice, close, low: "It's me. It's done, it's Tuesday, I just need him to sign the last one." A pause. "Dale. Dale, I swear on my mother."

Skaggs let go of her jacket and stepped back and looked at the floor, which is the closest thing to shame I've ever seen out of that man.

Rennie came up out of the chair with her mouth open and turned on the only person left in the room who loved her.

"You locked the doors!" she screamed. "You told me to handle it! You said you didn't care what she did as long as it stopped! You locked the front door and you turned off the lot lights and you went home, and you knew, Trent, so don't you stand there-"

"That's enough," Trent said. It was the quietest thing in the room and it shut her up.

He looked at me. Three years of him looking slightly past me, and then he looked at me.

"Della," he said.

"Don't," I said. "Not in front of everybody."

Nobody spoke for a while. Marisol Vega unmuted herself and said, "Mrs. Mabry? I'll need that file Monday. All of it." Then she hung up.

It took two weeks.

Rennie's third of Mabry Lanes went to me, not to Skaggs's lot and not to a bank sale. The number was seventy-eight thousand, all of it in my name, my signature, my ledger, and I signed it on November 16 at thirty-two weeks with my hand steady because I'd already done the math twenty times.

The building had come to mean something none of us expected.

Trent packed a duffel on a Tuesday and stood in the kitchen and said, "I'll come back when you can look at me." He set his wedding band on the counter next to the register on his way out and left it there. It's still there. Through the front glass I can see him standing in the rain in the parking lot some nights with his collar up, not coming in, and I don't go to the door, and I don't know what that makes me.

The mop handle props the front door open now. The lock's mine.

I took a rag to the league board on the wall behind the register, the one with forty-one years of Thursday nights written in grease pencil, and I wiped the whole thing clean, and I wrote DELLA MABRY in the first slot in my own handwriting.

I left the second line blank on purpose.

Charlene asked me why once, standing there in the cold with her coat on and her binder under her arm, and I told her the truth: because whoever's name goes there is going to have to want it. I'm not filling it in for anybody again.