Russ stood at the line for a long time. Behind him, his father said, "Well? Come on—" and from three seats down Augie Brzezinski said, not loud, but in a voice Wally had never heard him use, "Ronnie. Sit down," and Ron Kubiak, after a second, sat down.
Russ moved all the way to the left side of the approach. He held the ball at his chest. He took his steps, slow, and his arm came down and through, and he let the ball go soft and watched it, standing at the line, not turning away. It rolled across the lane at an angle, left to right, all that way, sixty feet of maple and pine, and it didn't hurry, and it didn't hook, and it went to the corner like it was going to visit someone.
It took the ten pin off its spot so gently that the pin barely made a sound.
The Knights rose up out of their seats like a purple wave. Stosh took off his cardigan. Hank waved his cane so hard he nearly hit Debbie. Busia did not stand up, but she nodded once, the way she nodded at the end of Mass.
Russ walked back to the bench. He sat down next to Wally, hard, and put his face in his hands, and his shoulders were shaking, and he was laughing, or the other thing, or both.
"You're up," he said into his hands. "Don't screw it up."
* * *
Wally needed nine pins.
Not a strike. That was the funny part. With the spare from Russ's tenth and his handicap and everything else, the green numbers said that if he threw two balls and got nine pins total in the tenth, they tied. Ten and they won. One strike would do it outright. But he didn't need a strike. He needed ten pins, any way he could get them.
He picked up the blue Ebonite. He stood on the approach, on the left side, and looked down the lane, and the pins were just ten white things standing on their spots a foot apart from each other, with room in between, and nobody was ganging up on him.
He took three steps. He went down low. His right foot slid out under him on the leather sole of a shoe that was his size, and the ball went past his ankle and off his fingers spinning, and it curved.
It came into the pocket from the left, the way Augie had taught him, the way he'd watched a hundred times from the back. And it hit. And it was the clean sharp crack. And the pins went down, and down, and down, all of them, all together, like they'd agreed to it—
Except one.
The seven pin, in the back left corner, the lefty's corner, rocked out toward the gutter and back. Out toward the gutter and back. It wobbled for what felt like a full minute.