My grandfather and I cleaned out the gutters. Actually, I held the ladder while he climbed up and pulled out dead leaves and all sorts of gunk from the metal drains that clung to the edge of the roof. I had to do this once at home with my father, but for some reason it didn’t bother me as much in Maine.
“Look out below,” my grandfather called every time he was about to drop another handful of mucky glop he’d dug out from those disgusting things. He was seeing how close he could get it to me without hitting me. It was actually pretty funny. One time he misjudged, and it went all over my shirt.
“Hey!” I screamed at him, laughing. “Watch out or I’ll tip this ladder over.”
He laughed, too. “Well, that shirt was so dirty already I can hardly see the difference.”
When we had finished the gutters along the front of the house he climbed down. We raked the little globs into several piles and then my grandfather threw down the rake, tossed back his shoulders, and shouted, “Lunch!” As he opened the screen door he glanced over his shoulder at me. “We’ll do the back tomorrow.”
Once inside, he went upstairs and came down with a T-shirt that must have belonged to Angela. It was more of an old-person T-shirt than a regular T-shirt, if you know what I mean. But it wasn’t bad; it was black with a sparkling picture of the Eiffel Tower on it.
“At least it’s clean.” Grandpa smiled as he tossed it to me. It even kind of fit.
There wasn’t a lot in the fridge, but we found enough for grilled cheese. When we were finished, Grandpa pushed his chair back. “Now,” he said, “nap, then bowling.”
I wasn’t in much of a napping mood, since I had slept so well the night before, so while Grandpa slept I wandered from room to room. The place definitely had an old-person smell about it, which I was actually enjoying. On the bookshelf in the den I found an old high school yearbook that belonged to my dad. I couldn’t believe it. Last year when I got my high school yearbook for the first time, my dad had tried to find his senior yearbook and couldn’t—here it was.
I hated to admit it, but his page was actually pretty cute. There were two photos on it. In one his hair was long, and he was looking just past the camera. It was a pretty stiff, formal shot. But in the other photo he was with a friend, and they were both smiling directly at the camera—they looked so young and happy. I’d never seen my dad look so carefree.
There was also a quote on the page. Most of the kids had quotes from rock songs on their pages, but my dad had lines from a poem by Robert Frost. “. . . I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.” It seemed fitting for my dad. Responsible.
I was about to flip the page when I noticed something down on the bottom right corner, tucked away, as if it was hiding there, clinging to the edge of the book. It was another quote—“But if dreams came true, oh, wouldn’t that be nice.” Beneath it, the quote was attributed to B. Springsteen, who I knew my dad liked from his classic rock radio station, so it was no accident that it was there. If dreams came true, oh, wouldn’t that be nice? So true, but so unlike my dad. So wistful. I stared and stared at that quote.
Eventually my grandfather came downstairs singing some song about it being a long way to Tipperary, wherever that is.
“Let’s go, Lulu,” he called out.
I shoved the yearbook back on the shelf and chased after him out the door. Davis was already waiting by my grandfather’s car.
“Friday is bowling day,” Grandpa said as we piled in. The bowling alley was a few miles out of town down the main road in a low white building with a red roof, standing by itself in a parking lot. It actually looked like a very, very long trailer home, with that kind of metal siding that looks sort of temporary, but isn’t.
There were more lanes inside than I thought there could be, about twenty or so. The ceiling was low, the place was pretty cluttered. Trophies were sitting haphazardly up on shelves, a banner on the wall proclaimed Mid-Coast Regional Finals 4th Place 1998, an old pinball machine with a mermaid theme had been shoved into a corner, and of course there was a big rack of really used-looking bowling shoes for rent. It was an old movie come to life.
But what was really bizarre was that the bowling was something called candlepin bowling, which is totally different from regular bowling. Not that I’m a big bowler—in fact, I’ve done it maybe a dozen times in my entire life—but I had never heard of this before. The ball was much smaller and the pins were tall and skinny.
“That’s the way we do it up here in God’s country,” my grandfather said.
“I think it came from Canada,” Davis said as he was leaning over tying his shoes.
I liked it a lot better than regular bowling. First, you got three chances each time instead of two, and since the ball was so much smaller I didn’t have to twist out of the way or smash it into my thigh like I always did with regular bowling. I almost broke 100 in the first game, which would have been a personal best.
The place was so old, they didn’t have electronic scoreboards. My grandfather showed me how to keep score with a paper and pencil.
“Your father loved to keep score,” he told me.
“Dad used to bowl?”
“Are you kidding me? Your father was a superb bowler.”
“No way.”
“I swear to you.”
“Weird,” I said.
“Had his own bowling ball too. Wasn’t a candlepin ball, but he had a purple bowling ball.”
“Purple?”
“With his name engraved on it.”
“You’re making this up.”
“Mike, it said.”
“Mike?” I screamed. “You’re totally making this up!”
“I swear on my life,” my grandfather said and made some weird crossing sign in front of himself. “Not only that, but he was in a junior league for a few years. I think he was team captain one season.”
“Captain? Did they wear those ridiculous shirts?”
“I think they just had T-shirts, if memory serves me correct, which it does less and less these days.” He laughed. “Then he just grew out of it, or lost interest. One day it was done. That’s the way it was with your father. When he was done he was done.”
My grandfather was quiet for a while. “Don’t know what the hell ever happened to that ball,” he said softly.
“I can’t believe this, that’s crazy,” I said. “When he’s taken us a few times, or I’ve had to go bowling for some stupid birthday party, he has never mentioned he was on a bowling team.”
For dinner we drove a few miles into Rockland, which was a much nicer town than Bennelton.
“You ever eat sushi?” my grandfather asked. The three of us were walking past some fairly fancy shops on the very quaint Main Street.
“My fave,” I said.
“I knew I liked you for a reason,” Grandpa said.
“You buying, old man?” Davis asked.
My grandfather gave him a quick look out of the corner of his eye that I’m not sure he knew I saw. Davis smiled.
The sushi place had a small Japanese flag hanging outside. Inside, big white ball-shaped paper lamps dangled from the ceiling. It was very Zen. I liked it right away.
“You eat sushi often, Lucy?” Davis asked me as the waiter brought us hot towels to clean our hands. “I don’t think I ate sushi till a few years ago.”
“My granddaughter is very sophisticated,” Grandpa said as he scrubbed his face with his towel.
“Unlike her grandfather,” Davis said.
“Very true.” Grandpa grinned his half-toothless grin and tossed his towel back on the little canoe-shaped woven tray.
“It’s my father’s favorite thing to eat,” I told Davis, “so we get it pretty often.”
“Really?” Grandpa said. “I wouldn’t think he’d be so adventurous. Good for him.”
“Well,” I said, “he does order the same thing every time.”
For some reason my grandfather thought that was the funniest thing he had ever heard. He laughed so hard that people started to look around from nearby tables.
After dinner we had some mint leaf ice cream, which I had never heard of before, but was pure delicious. The only person I have ever met who eats ice cream faster than me is my grandfather. Since I still had no clothes except what I came in and the borrowed Eiffel Tower shirt, my grandfather bought me a very cool T-shirt with crazy Japanese writing on it.
Back home, the phone was ringing as we walked through the door.
“Yello!” my grandfather shouted into the receiver. After a brief pause he said, “Hello, Michael. How are you?”
He listened for a bit more, all the while looking right at me.
“We’re doing great. Aren’t we, Lulu? Would you like to speak with her?”
He held out the receiver. I took it from him.
“Hi, Dad,” I said.
“Well, there you are,” my father said. His tone was really flat, like he was trying to be very normal.
“Yup, I’m right here,” I said.
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah, I’m great. We just had sushi.” I was trying to sound very upbeat.
“Uh-huh.” He couldn’t have cared less. “What was the idea of this stunt, Lucy? Your mother has been worried sick. So have I.”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“We’ll talk about it when I come and get you.” He cut me off hard. “I have several open houses this weekend, but I’m planning to come up on Monday, as long as everything there is still okay.”
“Things are great here.”
“Uh-huh,” he said again. “Your mother wants to speak with you. Hold on.”
“Okay.”
“Hold on,” he repeated. Where exactly did he think I was going at this point?
My mom was a bit gentler, asking how I was getting on and what we were doing. She was glad I was eating so well. But she didn’t totally give me a pass.
“Your father and I are very, very upset, Lucy. Anything could have happened to you.” I explained to her that my father didn’t need to come up and get me. I was totally fine, and I could take the bus back down in a few days.
“I know your father wants to go up to get you, but there is a lot going on at work, so we’ll see,” my mother said. “Hang on, your father wants to speak with you again.”
My dad must have been standing right next to my mom.
“Lucy?”
“Yes.”
I could tell something was coming.
“What could you have possibly been thinking, going over to Thomas’s house like that?”
I wanted to scream, “What the hell did you expect me to do once I found out that I had a brother living a few blocks away? Just be a loser and ignore it, like you?”
I didn’t say anything.
I didn’t sleep as well that night as I had the night before—not after that call.
I woke up just as it was getting light. Grandpa’s house was quiet, but a different quiet than my own house. I lay in bed for a long time. I really didn’t know what I was going to do about anything.
I had closed the window before going to sleep since it was still chilly up here in the north at night, and so I got up to open it. The birds were singing again as I got back into bed. I remembered the cardinal and thought about getting back up to see if he was the one singing. Instead I tucked in deeper under the covers. After a little while I thought I could hear people talking outside. Then I definitely heard my grandfather’s laugh, so I got up and went to the window.
Grandpa was by the edge of his property, talking over the shrubs with the woman next door. She was tending her garden, watering. Their conversation drifted up to me.
“. . . he never knew we knew.” My grandfather was in the middle of a story, waving his hands around. “It was his mother who finally solved the mystery. She found out that the girl loved tomatoes.”
The woman laughed. “How?”
“We had a Fourth of July block party, and our cute little blond neighbor had her paper plate piled high with slices of only juicy red tomatoes.”
The woman laughed again. “You are a stitch, Harold,” she said to him. I’d never heard anyone call someone a stitch before. My grandfather laughed.
“It was like clockwork,” he went on. “Every time I’d pick one and put it on the windowsill to ripen, the next day it would be gone. We never suspected it might be Michael, since when we asked him about it he looked so confused and shook his head. He was normally such an honest kid.”
“Honest, really? You sure he was your son?” They both laughed again. They were having a high old time at the crack of dawn.
“Broke his teenage heart when they moved away. His daughter Lucy is up with me now, visiting for a while.” He sort of turned to gesture toward the house and I dove back from the window. I didn’t want him to see me eavesdropping.
While I was taking a shower and trying not to get water all over the giant taped-up crack, I couldn’t get out of my head the fact that my father had been in love with a tomato-eating blond when he was a thieving teenage bowler who had harbored secret dreams. Would I ever be able to look at a tomato the same way again? Or a bowling ball? Or even listen to B. Springsteen for that matter?