Chapter 4: League Night

"Then you've never met him," I said.

I walked around her.

Fran followed with a suitcase in each hand and bumped Beatrice's shoulder with the second one.

"Oops," Fran said.

She did not sound sorry.

Fran rents the top floor of a two-flat on Lowe Avenue, four blocks from the house we grew up in.

Her couch pulls out into a bed with a bar across the middle of your back.

I slept on it for two nights and loved every minute.

There was a Sox calendar in the kitchen and nail polish on every flat surface.

Nobody had put a seating chart on anything.

Monday Fran went to the salon and I sat at her kitchen table with my dead paint tubes.

I squeezed each one.

Nine of twenty-two still worked.

I bought more on Tuesday with the last money in my own checking account.

It was the account I'd had since I was nineteen.

Graydon never knew it existed.

Tuesday night I drove to Moonlite to warn Hutch.

Fran came because she said she wasn't letting me near "the North Shore people" without backup.

"He's not North Shore people."

"He has their face. I'll decide."

It was league night.

Every lane was lit.

Eight teams in matching shirts filled the place, and the shirts did not match each other at all.

One team was in purple satin with lightning bolts.

One team was four retired mailmen in shirts that said Return to Sender.

The bartender with the pencil behind her ear slid us two beers before we asked.

"He's on lane nine," she said. "The ball return ate a ball again."

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