Inside the bowling bag there was no ball. There were twenty eight small green notebooks, one for every year, held together with rubber bands, and a manila envelope with a Tucson postmark. I sat on the closet floor in my coat and opened the oldest notebook first. The pages were in the blocky pencil hand of my father, the hand that signed my report cards. Friday, September 5, 1997. Dale Pruitt bowled 171. Same maroon shirt, number twelve on the back. Still no word of the girl.
Every Friday was the same, for twenty eight years. Dale Pruitt bowled a 160 or a 190. Dale Pruitt bought a pitcher. Dale Pruitt laughed at the other end of the table, where his wife poured the coffee. Under each line my father had written the same four words in the margin. I am still watching. I turned page after page, and my throat closed, because I understood that my quiet father had kept a promise to a child he barely knew by sitting near a man he hated, every week, in silence, for half his life.
Then I opened the envelope. Inside was a single sheet of lined paper, dated March of 2019, in the careful print of a young woman. Dear Mr. Ostertag. You do not know me, but I remember you. I remember grilled cheese in triangles and a chocolate malt, and a big man who never said much and never missed a Wednesday. My name used to be Kimmy. I read about your retirement in a bowling newsletter my uncle left behind. I am alive, and I am safe, and I am afraid to come home. I do not know if my mother will want me.
Clipped behind it was the carbon of a reply, written in the same blocky pencil. Dear Kimmy. I saw who took you, and I told the police, and nobody listened. I am sorry for that. I will not tell anyone you wrote. There will be two lunches at the snack counter every Wednesday at noon, and you may come on any one of them, today or in ten years. No questions. No police. Take all the time you need. Your friend, Walter Ostertag. A seat kept empty for a child can be the kindest sentence a lonely man ever writes.
I drove to the bowling alley with the bag on my lap and found Ilse in the kitchen, scraping the grill. She did not need me to explain. She wiped her hands on her apron and sat down on a milk crate. “He told me the whole thing,” she said quietly. “Dale Pruitt is the uncle of that girl. Her father was his brother, Ray, who lost the custody fight in 1997. The judge gave Kimmy to her mother, and Ray swore he would never see his daughter raised by that woman. So Dale walked her out the side door, and Ray was waiting in a car out on the highway.”
Ray took her to Arizona, and he raised her under another name, and he died in 2018. Kimmy was twenty eight years old and alone, with a stranger life and a dead father. Ilse said that was when she wrote. “Your daddy wanted her to come on her own,” she said. “If the police came pounding, she might have run again. He thought a girl who has been taken once needs to choose to come back.” I said he might have told me. Ilse took my hand. “He did not want it to be your burden, Gail. He wanted it to be his.”
That Friday night I walked into the bowling alley in my good coat and sat at the scorer table, where my father used to sit. Dale Pruitt was warming up on alley number eleven, a big gray man in a maroon shirt. I laid the green notebook open on the table, and I looked at him until he looked back. He stopped with the ball halfway to his chest. The whole league went quiet. Then he put the ball down very gently, as if it might break, and walked toward me with his shoulders sinking.
“Walt knew,” he said, in a voice like gravel. “I always knew he knew.” His wife, across the room, put her hand over her mouth. Dale sat down hard on the bench and told me everything. He had carried that child out of the building on the worst day of his life, and he had bowled every Friday since, with a stone in his chest, waiting for somebody to knock him down. “I kept coming,” he said, “because I wanted to be caught.” By ten at night the detective on duty was taking his statement at the same table where the scores were kept.
Donna Novotny, the mother of Kimmy, was seventy four years old and lived in a small apartment in Kenosha with a cat and a wall of photographs. When I knocked on her door and said my name, she looked at the notebooks in my arms and sat right down on the floor in the hallway. I told her that her daughter was alive. I told her she had a lunch waiting for her at the end of a counter, and that it had been waiting for twenty eight years. She did not say a word for a long time. Then she said, “I have never missed a Wednesday either.”
I wrote to the address in Tucson that same night. I said my father had passed in January. I said the stool was empty, but the lunch was still on, and that Ilse would make it herself. I said her mother was alive and well and had never stopped looking. I mailed it at dawn. For three weeks there was no answer. I began to dread the mailbox. Then, on a Wednesday in March, with the sleet coming down sideways, a woman of thirty six with long brown hair and a small suitcase pushed open the front door of the bowling alley.
She walked down the counter without looking left or right, and she sat on the last stool. Ilse, at the grill, never turned around. Her shoulders shook. In four minutes she set down two grilled cheese sandwiches cut in triangles and two chocolate malts. Behind the swinging door, Donna was standing with both hands on her chest. I watched the woman take the first triangle with both hands, bite it, and smile with a mouth that was all there. “It tastes exactly the same,” Kimmy whispered. “Exactly like I remember.”
Dale Pruitt pleaded guilty in June, and the court gave him probation, because the daughter he took stood up in the courtroom and asked for mercy. Her mother stood beside her and said she wanted her child more than a sentence. Now, every Wednesday at noon, the last stool at the snack counter has a small brass plate that says Reserved for Walter. Kimmy eats both lunches now, with her mother beside her, and sometimes with me. The headpin of my father sits on the counter, beside the napkin holder, and nobody ever moves it.