My Husband's Brother Owns My Secret novel · Chapter 31 of 32

Chapter 31: Lane Seven

The gallery door opened at one minute past eight.

The cold came in first.

Then a mailman.

Then another, and another, and the fourth, the one who drove the seventy-two.

Then the purple satin team.

Then every Tuesday night bowler in the city of Chicago, coming through the door two at a time.

They were all wearing the same shirt.

Brand new bowling shirts, stiff from the box, in the exact blue of the sheet.

MOONLITE LANES across the back in white.

On the front pocket, in white script: Team Cahill.

The purple satin captain was wearing one.

I'd never seen him in anything but purple satin.

He looked at me like it hurt him and he'd do it again.

Hutch came in last.

He had his one charcoal suit on with a blue bowling shirt under the jacket instead of a dress shirt.

It did not go.

It was the best thing I'd ever seen a man wear.

"Sorry," he said, out of breath. "Printer spelled it C-A-H-I-L. We made him do it again."

"You made him do forty shirts again?"

"Forty-two. Fran ordered two for herself."

Fran was already pulling hers on over her gold dress, ears bright red.

"I KNEW you couldn't lie," I said.

"I lied for six hours! That's a record!"

The room had gone quiet when they came in.

Then the classmate's students started clapping.

Then the seniors.

Then everybody, even the curator in her black suit.

The mailmen found themselves on the wall and stood in front of the painting in a row, exactly the way they'd refused to pose.

The one who drove the seventy-two looked at himself asleep for a long time.

"That's accurate," he said finally, and blew his nose.

The notary found the red dot and asked who'd bought it.

When I told him a couple from Evanston, he was personally offended.

"Evanston," he said. "They don't even bowl in Evanston."

Hutch found me by the back wall.

He stood with me in front of the two paintings, the girl asleep and the woman awake.

He read the white card.

MODEL: NEVE CAHILL, AGE 21, BRIDGEPORT, CHICAGO.

He didn't say anything.

He put his arm around me and his mouth against my hair and stayed there.

We closed the gallery at ten.

Then forty-two people in blue shirts and twenty seniors in a church van drove to Avondale.

Moonlite was dark when we got there.

Hutch unlocked the front door and turned on one row of lights.

Lane seven.

Only lane seven.

"Why seven?" I said.

"That's where you threw your first ball in October. Straight into the gutter."

"You remember that?"

"I remember everything you've done in this building."

He picked up a ball from the rack and held it out to me.

The light one. The one he'd fixed my fingers in.

"Bowl one," he said.

"Hutch, I'm in a dress."

"Bowl one."

The whole league was standing behind the scorer's table, very quietly.

Fran was holding her phone up with both hands.

I took off my heels.

I stepped up to the line in my stockings on the cold wood.

I didn't aim.

I threw it.

It wobbled down the lane and knocked over two pins on the left, the same two pins as October.

The league cheered.

The machine swept the deck.

A fresh rack of pins came down onto the lane, ten of them, bright under the one row of lights.

Something was wrapped around the neck of the head pin.

A dollar bill.

I walked down the lane in my stockings, over the foul line, where you are never, ever supposed to go.

Nobody stopped me.

The dollar was tied on with a twist of string.

Inside it was a ring.

Plain gold. A small stone the blue of the sheet.

On the dollar, in Hutch's square handwriting, a date. November third.

"I took it back out of the till that night," Hutch said behind me. "I've had it in my wallet ever since."

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