Mr. Washington, the retired Army sergeant, took off his VFW cap and pulled a folded check out of his jacket, and he laid it on the table next to the birthday cake.
Son, he said to Preston, you said somebody has to spray the disinfectant. Let me tell you what these lanes mean to us.
When the senior center lost its funding, Mr. Washington said, a lot of us old-timers lost the only place we had to go. We are widowers, most of us. Some days nobody speaks to us at all. And Tommy here started giving us free bowling every Tuesday and Thursday, no charge, just so we would have somewhere to be, somebody to see. He kept us alive, is what he did. So we passed a cap around, all of us, and this check is every dollar we could put together, to help keep his doors open, because he kept them open for us.
The party had gone quiet. Tommy would not take the check, and Mr. Washington would not put it away.
Preston bragged that his app had more users than the alley had customers, and the men at lane nine were the proof that some places hold a person up in a way no app ever will.
Tommy finally folded the old sergeants hand back around the check and told him to spend it at the snack bar, on the whole Tuesday crew, for a year. Mr. Washington laughed until his eyes watered.
I am Tommys father. I opened that alley on South 27th Street in 1979, and my boy runs it now the way I always hoped he would, like it belongs to the whole neighborhood. Preston, in his vest, looked around that room full of old men who had somewhere to go, and he put his craft beer down and did not say another word about smelly shoes.