"So slide in your sneakers. It's a cellar, not the Masters." Augie folded his hands on his stomach. "Go on."
Wally stood up. He went to the approach. He held the blue ball in his left hand, and it felt strange there, and also not strange, the way it felt strange to write your name with your eyes closed and then look down and see that you had done it fine.
He didn't take four steps. He didn't think about four steps. He took three, because three felt right, and at the end of the third he went down low on his right knee, almost the way he had on the day of the shoe, his body low and his arm swinging close past his ankle, and he let it go.
It wasn't a strike. It wasn't anything like a strike. The ball went down the lane slower than any ball the Knights threw, wobbling a little, and it drifted toward the left side and didn't curve at all, and it came into the pins on the far left edge, light, and took out the seven and the four and the eight and the two and stopped there.
Four pins.
It was the first time in his life he had knocked down a pin with a bowling ball.
He stood at the foul line and looked at the four empty spaces where the pins had been, and something happened in his chest that he didn't have a name for, and he was glad nobody was down here but Augie, because he thought his face might be doing something.
"Huh," said Augie behind him, very gently. "Look at that."
Then he cleared his throat and got up off the bench. "Okay. Not bad. Terrible footwork. You're gonna need shoes."
"I have—"
"You have your dad's shoes," Augie said. "Which are a size ten and a half. Which are built for a right-hander, kid. The slide sole's on the left. A lefty slides on his right foot. You been trying to bowl wearing a pair of shoes that are fighting you on every single step." He looked at Wally, not unkindly. "You been trying to walk in Eddie's shoes. Literally. Nobody can do that. Not even Eddie could've done that in somebody else's."
Wally didn't say anything. He looked down at his sneakers, which had a hole starting in the left toe.
"You keep his shoes," Augie said. "You keep 'em forever. You put 'em someplace good. But you don't bowl in 'em. You hear me?"
"Yeah," Wally said. His voice came out funny. "I hear you."
The shoes came from Ray's Pro Shop on Forest Home Avenue, a narrow store with a drilling machine in the back and a wall of bowling balls in colors Wally hadn't known balls came in, and they were paid for out of a Folgers coffee can that Busia kept on the top shelf of the pantry behind the flour, which nobody else in the house was allowed to touch, and which apparently held money for exactly this kind of emergency.