Wally stood at the foul line and watched it. Everybody did. Three hundred kids and their parents in the biggest bowling alley he had ever been in, and seven old men in purple, and his mother, and his Busia, and Augie in his tie, and Russ, and Ron Kubiak, all of them watching one pin.
It wobbled one more time.
And then it lay down, with a soft wooden tock, and rolled into the pit.
* * *
Ten.
He didn't remember much about the next part. He remembered that the little cartoon pin on the monitor fell over, and somebody yelled "Ohhh, cool!", and that Russ grabbed him around the neck so hard he couldn't breathe and lifted him off the floor and spun him around in a circle, and that one of the Knights cried, and that it was Hank, and that Augie walked away down the concourse very fast and stood looking at a cigarette machine for a long time with his back to everybody. He remembered that his two fill balls, the ones he threw afterward because the rules said he had to, went straight into the gutter one after the other, and nobody cared, and the Knights cheered for both of them anyway.
He remembered his mother, holding him with both arms, saying into his hair, "Oh, he'd have died, he'd have died," and laughing, and this time it was just laughing.
And he remembered Ron Kubiak.
Ron stood up while all of it was going on. He put down his beer cup on the seat. He looked at Russ, who was standing in the middle of the Knights getting his hair rubbed by seven old men at once, red-faced, grinning, wiping his eyes. Wally saw Ron's mouth open. He didn't know what Ron was going to say. Maybe Ron didn't know either.
Then Russ looked over and saw his father, and the grin went still on his face.
Ron Kubiak closed his mouth. He looked at his son for a long moment across the plastic seats. Then he nodded, once, a short jerky nod like it hurt his neck to do it. And he turned around and walked out through the glass doors into the parking lot, into the March afternoon, where it was raining a little, and he didn't come back in.
Russ watched him go.
"Hey," Wally said.
"I know," said Russ. He wiped his face again with his sleeve. "It's fine." He took a breath. "He nodded, though. Did you see that? He did nod."