The president of the bowling company, Mr. Walter Brandt, walked with me past forty women in purple shirts and stopped at the door of the lane machine room, and the whole alley went silent except for the jukebox. I was seventy nine years old, standing in the place where Stan had built his machine in 1972, and my daughter Karen was coming toward us from the bar with her face tight and her hands folded. “Mother,” she said, “this is a private room.” Mr. Brandt looked at her kindly. “Karen,” he said, “I already know what is in there. I am not here to embarrass you.”
He explained, in the plain voice of a man who has done a hard thing before. His company had been preparing to buy Kaminski Lanes as a historic site, with the machine as its centerpiece, and had sent an auditor in July to go through the building and the books. The auditor had found, in the back room behind the toolbox of Stan, sixty three empty bottles in boxes. And he had found that over eighteen months, nine thousand dollars had gone from the bar register into a canvas bag, hidden there, to pay for them. Karen had gone gray.
“I will tell you why I am telling you this in front of forty people,” said Mr. Brandt. “Eleven years ago my own daughter was exactly where you are. I called it a family matter, and I kept quiet, and she is not here to tell the story. I would rather be rude tonight than quiet.” Karen stared at the carpet. In the silence, I heard a bowling ball clunk down the far lane and strike nothing at all. Forty women in purple shirts looked at their shoes. Not one of them said a word about senile.
A lane oiling machine unveiled in a back room gave one widow the evening to bring her daughter back to the league in Milwaukee.
I gave my terms in front of the machine room door, in the voice I had used to call the league to order for forty years. “Karen, nobody in this building is going to shout at you. You are going to go with Mr. Brandt to the car, and in the morning you will go to the program in Waukesha that his company has already arranged and paid for, and I will stay open for you as long as it takes. The sale goes ahead. The alley stays an alley, and the machine stays on display. And ladies, I would like to keep score again on Tuesday.”
Karen put her hands over her face, and the words came through her fingers. “Mama, I started in the machine room because it was the only quiet place in the building. Daddy used to sit there with a cigar and say that everything could be fixed with the right tool. I could not find one. I told people you were slipping because I needed them looking at you instead of me.” She lowered her hands, and her face was ruined. “I took the money from the bar. I am so ashamed. I counted every dollar. I meant to put it back.”
At that, Karen darted past us, shoved open the door of the machine room, grabbed the canvas bag of money and the ledger from behind the toolbox of Stan, and ran for the back door of the alley, out toward the alley behind the building. She did not reach it. Peggy Wozniak, captain of the Tuesday league, seventy eight years old and a three time state champion, stepped smoothly onto the approach of lane twelve and sent a sixteen pound ball down the polished boards, straight across the hallway floor, where it stopped flat against the exit door.
The ball rolled to a halt against the push bar and rested there like a boulder, black and shining under the ceiling lights, and not a single person in the alley moved. Karen stopped, with the bag in her hand. Peggy looked at her down the length of the hallway. The forty women in the purple shirts had risen from their chairs, every one, and stood quietly along the wall, saying nothing. Karen set down the canvas bag on the carpet, one finger at a time. Then she walked back to me and laid her head on my shoulder, the way she had when she was three.
The money consequences were gentle. The nine thousand dollars was repaid from my own account to the register before the books were closed, and Mr. Brandt declined to report it. The company bought Kaminski Lanes and the patent for five million, three hundred thousand dollars, and the alley stayed open. The old machine of Stan was set up under glass by the door with a brass plaque. Karen entered the program in Waukesha, and the company held her job at the bar for as long as she needed.
In the name of Stan, who passed in 2022, I started the Stan Kaminski Fund. It pays for bowling leagues, shoes and balls for seniors and children, and for treatment for families, in Milwaukee, Waukesha and Racine counties. In the first year we sponsored twenty two leagues and placed thirty four people in treatment. One was a boy of nine from the South Side who had never held a ball. He rolled a gutter ball, a second gutter ball, and a third that hit one pin, and he raised both arms as if he had won the Olympics.
Karen came home on a Tuesday in April, one hundred and ten days clean. The league was already seated. Forty women in purple shirts turned, and Peggy handed Karen a pencil and the scoresheet. She looked at me. I nodded. Karen took the first seat at the scorer table, and the first ball rolled. She wrote down the pins in her neat hand, one frame at a time, and when I stood behind her and looked over her shoulder, there was not a single mistake.