"A shoe," she said.
"Yeah."
"His shoe."
"Yeah."
She drove for a while. Helen Nowicki was thirty-nine years old and looked older that year, and younger sometimes when she forgot to be tired, and she had a way of gripping the steering wheel at ten and two like the car might try to escape. She had not been a bowler. She had met Eddie at a wedding at the Polish Falcons hall, where he had won a polka contest and she had come in second, with a different partner, and she had always said that she married him so she wouldn't have to lose to him anymore.
"Did it at least hit anything?" she asked.
Wally looked at her. She was looking straight ahead at the road, and the corner of her mouth was doing something.
"The ten pin," he said.
His mother made a noise. It came out of her nose. She put her hand over her mouth and the Citation drifted a little toward the center line and she yanked it back, and she made the noise again, and then she was laughing, really laughing, bent over the wheel at a red light on Kinnickinnic with the turn signal going tick tick tick, and Wally didn't know what to do, and then he was laughing too, and he couldn't stop, and he didn't know if it was laughing or the other thing, and it didn't seem to matter.
"The ten pin," his mother gasped. "Oh, he'd have died. He'd have—" She stopped. She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. "Well. You know what I mean."
"Augie said he'd have whupped me."
"Augie's right." The light turned green. She drove. "You're grounded. Two weeks."
"Okay."
"And you're doing whatever Augie says."
"Okay."