Read That Night for Free Online

imagined him circling the country until he found her.
    We were chalking a spiraling hopscotch into the street before my house and the fingers we moved along the tarred road were growing cold. It was mid-November. The dark tire marks in Sheryl’s lawn had lost their sharp edges, like scars that had begun to heal. Our fathers were raking leaves, receding already from the summer’s men’s club, ducking their heads after muffled greetings. Two cars pulled up to her house. A woman got out of one; a couple about our parents’ age got out of the other. The three climbed the steps, the couple looking behind and around them as the boys in the gang had done that night. The woman opened the door and then stepped back to let the couple inside. Behind the screen were the white stripes of the stairs. The shades in the living room went up, and after a bit of a struggle (we could see the woman’s forearms behind the glass, and then the man’s), the front windows groaned open. The moving vans were there by the first of the year.
    The bowling alley in our town was air-cooled: the decal on the door showed the letters capped with blue and-white glaciers, dripping like mounds of ice cream. Inside, the cold air smelled of foot powder and warm socks. There was a row of pinball machines in the entryway, a cigarette machine, two mahogany-colored phone booths with seats like Ping-Pong paddles and doors that turned on both a light and a fan when they were pulled closed. As you entered, there was always the seemingly faraway echo of rolling balls and falling pins. There was the sense, especially in the dimly lit area behind the alleys with its wiry carpeting and small square tables, its trophy hutch and padded bar, of a public place striving to become, for an hour or two, a place to call your own: a homey, ingratiating sense matched only by certain movie theaters and the basement rec rooms of some of our neighbors.
    From here Rick made his first troubled call, a day or two, perhaps as much as a week, before that night.
    He had not seen her at the supermarket where she worked and where he usually picked her up on summer evenings. The kid who collected the steel carts from the parking lot said she’d already gone home.
    He may have thought of driving to her house, but he was young enough to still be wary, even of her: young enough to fear that any change of routine could portend a sudden and inexplicable change of heart. He drove instead to the bowling alley, where he knew his friends would be. He called from there, the fan whirring above him, the distant sound of the balls and the pins like that of a battle heard from across a wide sea.
    Her mother’s voice was sad and determined. Sheryl wasn’t there. There was no saying when she’d be in.
    He rubbed his palms on his thighs before he left the booth, and outside he began to shrug even before his friends had turned to see him. “I don’t know where the hell she is.
    “Shopping,” one of them said.
    In a taunting voice, “Maybe she’s buying you a present, Ricky.”
    Only the thickest of them failing to imagine the worst, what was coming for him: the end of the romance.
    He stayed with them long after the hour he usually drove off alone with Sheryl. He leaned against his car, one foot hooked back onto the bumper. He grew impatient with their conversation, yet discouraged them when they said, “Let’s move.” He called her again. The summer-league bowlers had begun to play, and through the glass panels of the booth he could see the backs of their bright, identical shirts, foolish and indifferent—Mr. Carpenter and my father among them. He let the phone ring twenty-three times and then hung up and dialed again. Now it was busy.
    He left the booth before he could imagine her: carefully re cradling the receiver.
    Outside, some girls had arrived and he questioned each of them—quickly, not even attempting to seem casual, but making sure that tomorrow, when she rejoined him, he would not be