Did you forget what time we said? I say.
He taps the face of his watch. You know me, he says. I might be late, but I never miss the show.
We mosey to the games and catch the boys standing toe to toe and woofing at one another, a gauzy light glowing from a screen behind them. Cut it, Champ says, and the boys break apart. Damn, can’t take ya’ll nowhere.
Champ rents shoes and picks a lane and types our names in the machine: CHAMPion, BROLOSS 1, BROLOSS 2, THE MOMS. He points to the board, asks us if we see it, tell us it’s prophetic.
Champ must’ve watched one too many pro bowling tourneys or else my brother Pat in his day at the lanes. He picks a cobalt-blue ball and you should see his ritual. Before every turn he glances back at us, does a shuffle, twists his cap backwards, strolls to the dots, waits a movie pause, and rolls, leaving his wrist cocked till the ball strikes a pin. He don’t bowl many strikes, but he rarely misses a spare, but on the occasion he does he falls to his knees. The boy competes at everything, has done it since he was young. I asked him why once and he said he’d taken enough losses for his life. Who was I to argue?
He leaves pins on his next frame and I ask if it’s the best he can do.
If that’s the best you can do, I say, you best pray.
We play out the games Champ bought, Canaan pitching gutter after gutter and KJ leaving half his pins. We play out the games and my strikes and spares won’t stop. One strike I do a victory dance and ask Champ for a critique.
Funny, Champ says. Real funny. But a little sunshine don’t make a summer.
What the boys don’t know is there was a time when summers ran forever, when I bowled every week, a time when weekends Dawn and me would meet and pair off and play. Would roll until they called last game. What the boys don’t know is there was a time when I carried my own pink ball, years I bowled not a point below 180.
Champ begs a rematch, but I’m too tired, so he bowls alone, tells me he’s aiming at my high game. The boys and I eat chili dogs and chips and drink frigid Cokes. They tease Champ with a chant: Mom’s the champ, Champ’s not the champ.
This is a charm, but these wins will cost. These wins have cost, and I feel the price in my back and feet. Canaan helps me slip out of my rented shoes and I prop my socked feet in an empty chair and wait for Champ to tire of falling short.
We leave out together, Canaan and KJ — my babies — flitting up ahead and Champ slugging behind me with an honest frown. The garage is bright and empty, a car here, a truck there, the Honda. We stop outside of my car.
That was luck, Champ says. You know that was luck. Next time.
You still salty? I say. Look, if I win, you win, I say. If one wins, we all win. Besides, that was a blast.
Kaboom, he says.
He waits while I find my key, while the boys and I climb in, while I start the engine. I give it gas and it growls.
My son says he’s suffered a life’s worth of losses, but how many losses have I?
Here’s my wish — let the world see me now, a conqueror, high above my sorrows, a flagpole pushed through the pile.
Chapter 20
Around these parts, it ain’t but three types of men.
Do you want to know what kind of guy I am? Do you really want to know what kind of guy I am? I’m the type of dude who takes hellafied relational risks in hopes the fallout (often a result that features acute physical pain) coerces me to some decisive act. Take my girclass="underline" She’s a good woman, one of the best I’ve been with (and we know we’re not talking no short list neither), but sometimes, no lie, I wish instead of always accusing me, always threatening me, instead of doing that, I wish sometimes that she’d just leave. I mean, how many times does she have to discover a random number or an empty condom wrapper in my pocket, how many times does she have to suffer an acidic message from some scallywag (she breaks my codes like a federal agent!), how many 9/10 true rumors of me banging some chick with an ass that’s a small planet does she have to endure before she splits? Not threatens to bounce, but sashays right out of my life for good, those lustrous tresses waving good-bye, so long; have a cursed life. But since it don’t, as I said, seem like she’s making no definitive plans to break, I revert to my assbackwards tactic of inviting atomic consequence. Only here’s the thing, it hasn’t worked; matterfact, the most it’s done is flame already tense situations — e.g., she won’t leave and I can’t leave a woman who loves this hard and hurts this true, so I figured I’d go raw a few times in hopes I’d knock her up and she’d stay for good or, postconception, she’d realize I was not the one, visit the clinic, and flee for all time, though all the while, in the deep recesses where my purest sense exists, hoping my little spermatozoa would swim right past the target, cause truth be told, I’m about as ready for fatherhood as any old young punk you see on these streets with his pants hung low and a permanent sneer. In fact, in most of the ways that matter, I might be the paragon, the one who’s aborted (admitted wrong word choice here) by logic at the most inopportune times, then left to feel ambivalent about decisions that affect not only my well-being, but somebody else’s baseline joy. Real talk, if making tough decisions is part of being a man, then I might wind up a Geritol-popping juvenile, which is fait accompli for guys like me who screw up our lives one lousy judgment at a time.
But wait, the retrograde choices, they just might be in my genes. Case in point, my biological pops. Dude had three babies in less than a year by women who lived on the same block. One year, same block! Who could or would concoct such a tale? My mom was the last of the threesome, claims she didn’t know about the others until right after her grand old valedictorian speech (besides birth, the proudest moment of her life), the one she made the night after she found out about tiny fetus me. And talk about timing, this was a few years after the first Supreme Court abortion ruling, a couple years after Roe v. Wade, and, and, and, if you add to that my pop’s apparent predilection for barebacking, to the assured detriment of Mom’s nursing school dream, you can see how I could have easily ended up a coat hanger victim or the refuse of some clinic. To her credit, though, Moms wasn’t having it. She traded in plan A for plan B and set about becoming the best single mother she could.
At moments, the best single mother there is.
If we all could be so selfless.
It’s cold as an Eskimo’s nuts outside, colder, but the weather hasn’t thinned the crowd. We (the we being me and Kim) check in and luck out on seats beside an über-pregnant woman that’s putting a whole lot of pressure on the seams of her long dress. The lady has two tykes with her, neither of them old enough to tie their shoes. Old enough to tear up some shit, though, and they’re working at it with toddler flair: tugging things off the tables, pushing the cold button on the water cooler, ripping jagged pages out of pamphlets. On a break from a reign of infant terror, one of them wobbles over by me and yanks at my pants. Are you okay? he says, craning up and flashing a jagged-spaced grin. Yes, I’m okay, I say. Mommy say we get grocery, he says. You take us get grocery? Before I can answer, his mother approaches shouting his name (something multisyllabic a linguist would have a tough time pronouncing) and draws the little man backwards. These boys, she says, and shakes her head. Oh my gosh, my boys.
The infant attraction ain’t new. That’s always been me, the one who turns colicky babies into cooing machines, who attracts the little ones like the North Pole magnetic pull. My mom said it’s cause I got a good soul, that babies can see though your blunders and masks right into the maw of you, but little multisyllable, he must not sense my intentions, the visions I’ve had of discarding one last life.