Russ stared at her. Nobody, Wally thought, had ever said anything like this to him in his life. He looked as if someone had thrown cold water on him, or maybe warm water, or something he didn't have a word for.
"You are welcome here Sundays," said Busia. "You eat. You do not say things to my grandson. You understand?"
"Yes, ma'am," said Russ.
"Good." Busia got up and went to the stove. "Now. Kolaczki. Apricot or prune?"
"I don't know," Russ said, faintly. "I don't know what those are."
"Jezus Maria," said Busia to the stove, and brought both.
Bel-Air Lanes had forty lanes, carpet with stars on it, a cocktail lounge called the Starlite Room, and the new computer scoring that Augie said he would never put in Pulaski Lanes as long as he lived, because a man should be able to add. The scores came up on TV monitors over every lane in square green numbers, and when you got a strike a little cartoon of a pin falling over flashed on the screen and somebody, every single time, went "Ohhh, cool."
On the morning of March sixteenth, there were three hundred kids in the building and most of their parents, and the noise of it was like being inside a dishwasher.
The Knights came, all seven, and took up a whole row of spectator seats behind lanes twenty-nine and thirty with a cooler full of sandwiches. Hank Lisowski brought his granddaughter, who turned out to be Debbie Lisowski from lane nine, who sat down next to Wally's mother and said, "Hi, Mrs. Nowicki, my grandpa says Wally's got a hook now," and Wally's mother said, "That's what they tell me." Busia came, in her church coat and a scarf over her hair, and sat in the front row with her handbag in her lap, looking at the whole roaring building as if she had paid for it and was not yet sure she had gotten her money's worth.
Ron Kubiak didn't come.
Russ didn't say anything about it. He'd told Wally on the drive over, in the back seat of the Citation with his bowling bag on his lap, that his dad had to work, which was a Saturday, and which they both knew wasn't true, and Wally had said "Okay," and that had been the end of it. But Wally saw him look at the doors every time they opened.
They bowled lanes twenty-nine and thirty, Prep division, handicap, against eleven other teams on the same pair of lanes and the lanes next to them. Wally's handicap was sixty-eight pins a game, Russ's forty-seven. Handicap, Augie said, made you bowl against yourself.
In the first game, they bowled almost exactly what they were supposed to, which put them in seventh.
In the second game, something happened.