“…and Carol was saying…” and I will tell you what she was saying, because I have never forgotten it. She came through the glass doors of Pappas Lanes on a bright Saturday morning, carrying a white bakery bag and humming, in her blue cardigan and sensible shoes, and she called out, “Gus, honey, I brought you a koulouri, and look who I found at the church, he says he is on his way to see you.” Behind her, holding the door, stood a gray haired man in a white coat, with a stethoscope draped around his neck and a black leather bag in his hand.
I stood very still on the bench by lane twelve, with the cheap prepaid phone in my pocket. Carol put the bakery bag on the shoe counter. She kissed my cheek. She said that Nick had asked her to bring Dr. Ferris, who happened to be a friend of the family, for a little checkup, since I had been so tired. She said it in her warm, simple voice, with her eyes shining. And I realized, watching her, that she knew nothing. Nothing at all. My Carol had been used as a pawn, like a bowling pin in somebody else game.
I took her hands in mine. I said, “Carol, my love, please sit down.” I led her to the bar, and I sat her on the stool where Eleni used to sit during league night, and I asked Kayla, the new manager, to bring a glass of water. Then I took the phone from my pocket, and I handed it to my wife. I said, “Please read the first message. The one from March of 2020.” She put on her glasses. She read it. I watched the color leave her face, like water draining out of a tub.
A cheap prepaid phone taped inside a pinsetter, six hundred text messages, and a man in a white coat who had never met his patient.
Mom is in. She will marry the Greek. Give it a few years. Carol read it twice. She set the phone down on the bar, very gently, as though it were made of glass. Then she looked up at the man in the white coat, who had been standing awkwardly by the door, edging toward the exit. She said, in a voice that was calm and cold, “Dr. Ferris, would you mind telling me what kind of checkup my husband was supposed to have today?” He stammered something about routine tests. Carol said, “Doctor, you have never met my husband.”
Kayla had quietly gone to the office and telephoned the police. I learned this later. At the time, I only saw the door open and two officers come in, polite and calm, in navy uniforms. They asked Dr. Ferris for his identification. His hands shook as he gave it. Within five minutes, it was clear that he was not a licensed physician in Wisconsin. He was a retired pharmacist with a revoked license in Illinois, who for the last twenty years had written medical forms for money. He had been paid six thousand dollars in advance.
Nick walked in forty minutes later, in a long camel coat, whistling. He had come to collect his paper. He saw the officers, and Carol sitting at the bar, rigid as a statue, and me beside her with my cap in my hand, and he stopped in the aisle. His whistle faded. Carol did not shout. She stood up, walked down the aisle between the lanes, and stopped in front of him. She said, very quietly, “Nicholas, I raised you better than this. And I will never forgive you for using me.” And she slapped him, once, hard.
Nick was charged with attempted fraud and conspiracy to commit elder financial abuse. His lawyer argued for leniency, but the phone had six hundred messages, and a prosecutor named Mr. Lindgren was not in a lenient mood. Nick pleaded guilty in January. He received two years of supervised probation, a fine, and an order of no contact with either of us. Carol cried every evening for a month. I held her hand through every night of it, and I told her the truth. I said, “You did not marry me for him. You married me for you.”
And then, one cold night in February, with Carol asleep beside me, I woke at three in the morning and decided to tell her the secret I had been saving. At breakfast, I laid the sale papers on the kitchen table, between the coffee and the eggs. Five point one million dollars. She stared at them for a long time. Then she began to laugh, and cry, and laugh again, and she put her arms around my neck, and said, “Gus Pappas, you old Greek fox. You have been planning to surprise me for months.” I said, “Happy anniversary, a little early.”
The Chicago company kept the Pappas name, and the fish fry, and the old wooden sign over the door. They also kept lane twelve, which I asked them to leave exactly as it was, with the scuffed approach and the battered ball return. On the first Friday in March, we held a small private party. Fifty friends, a pot of Eleni avgolemono soup, and a cake in the shape of a bowling pin. Carol wore a green dress. Kayla poured the ouzo. And at eight o clock, I handed Carol a ball, a lightweight sixteen pounder, the one Eleni used to use.
She stood at the line, in her stocking feet, with her chin up. The whole room fell silent. She took four steps, swung her arm, and let it roll. It curved down lane twelve, slow and sure, and I held my breath. And the ball struck the pocket, center, and every pin went down with a crash. Strike. The entire alley erupted in cheers. Carol turned around, flushed and radiant, with both hands over her mouth. And I thought, for the first time since Eleni passed, that I was a very lucky man indeed.