SIX

As Patrick pulled his SUV into the parking lot of their destination, Shelagh could not help but let out a small chortle. "I cannot believe we're actually going bowling."

He glanced over with a grin. "You've never been right?"

"No, never."

"I've gone once—no, twice, I think—but it's been a very long time."

"Well, I'm rather excited to see what it's all about."

He gave her a cautioning look. "Well, don't get too excited; I'm not sure bowling is the most thrilling thing."

She gave a little shrug and followed him across the parking lot towards the entrance. When he'd asked her about their next dating adventure, he told her he wanted them to do some sort of activity and suggested bowling or miniature golf initially but said she was welcome to come up with an idea of her own. She'd chosen bowling mostly because it was an indoor activity and she was tired of the relentless August heat.

"What's your shoe size?" Patrick asked as they stepped into the bowling alley.

Initially confused, she responded with, "Excuse me?"

"You have to rent shoes to wear at a bowling alley; you can't wear your outside shoes."

"Oh." She glanced around at the rather dingy interior of the bowling alley and saw the sign with the prices for shoe and lane rental. "Do they clean the shoes between each use?"

He gave her a wry smile. "Don't ask questions you might not like the answer to, Shelagh." Then after a beat he added, "We don't have to stay if you're uncomfortable."

"No, no it's fine. I wear a size six-and-a-half, typically."

She followed him up to the counter where, after renting both pairs of shoes and a lane, they were given brief instructions on the ball sizes available. They changed their shoes and then selected balls. Shelagh was shocked at how heavy some of them were. She wasn't sure why she expected something not much heavier than a soccer ball, but some of the balls were significantly heavier than that. She selected one that seemed fine, but by the time she'd carried it to their lane she wondered if she might regret her choice.

"Shall I go first?" Patrick asked once they settled in.

"Yes, please," she said a bit pitifully. The alley was not entirely empty that evening, but the closest pair of bowlers was four lanes away and while she could sort of see what they were doing, she much preferred to have Patrick demonstrate for her the proper way to bowl.

"Right so the goal is to knock down all your pins—or as many as you can. You want to aim for the center of the lane to start, and you just sort of…throw it as hard as you can."

She watched as he stepped up and underhand threw the ball down the correct lane, only for it to end up directly in the gutter. He laughed and said, "At least I get a second chance." They waited a few moments for his ball to return and then he threw it again, that time clipping just one pin. "Better than zero," he said positively. "Your turn."

Feeling a distinct lack of confidence, Shelagh grabbed her ball from its resting spot and struggled for a moment to place her fingers in the correct holes. Once she'd done so, she stepped up, and gave the ball an underhand toss only for her shoe to slip and for the ball to flop pathetically down on the lane barely two feet from her. It drifted pathetically for a moment before it caught the edge of the gutter, dropped in, and then continued to roll away. She turned back to face Patrick, who was smirking.

"I think that ball was too heavy for me," she said.

He nodded. "Go choose a smaller one then. There's no rush."

After choosing a ball of a slightly lighter weight, Shelagh returned to the lane and threw it again. Her ball drifted to the left side and caught the gutter before hitting any pins, but at least it had made it a respectable distance down the lane with her first throw.

During the second round, Patrick knocked over a respectable seven pins while Shelagh knocked over her first two pins, which made her very proud of herself. But during the third round, she only got one pin compared with Patrick's six. When her turn came next, she was determined to knock down enough pins to get her score into the double digits, but sadly her first throw went directly into the gutter. On the second throw, she took her time, approaching slowly and lining up the ball just slightly to the right as her ball tended to drift left. Then, she let it go at just the perfect moment. It sailed down the lane, crashed squarely into the first pin, and successfully knocked the rest of them down.

At this unexpected sight, she let out a small yelp and turned to Patrick, whose jaw now hung wide open. "How-how did you do that?" he gasped, slowly rising out of his seat as though he needed to see all ten pins lying on the ground before he believed the strike had happened.

A joyful laugh escaped her lips. "I—I have no idea!"

Eyes wide, he slowly looked towards her. "That's incredible! Are you sure you've never bowled before?"

"No, among many other things."

"Like what?"

She shrugged and then clasped her hands together as she said, "Well, I've never played any sports."

His nose scrunched with disbelief. "You must have—in PE."

"What's that?"

"Ah…in school—gym class?" he clarified.

"Oh no I didn't have that. I was homeschooled."

"Oh." He gazed at her curiously for a moment and then asked, "What about a concert? Have you ever been to one?"

A proud smile crossed her face. "Yes, I have. Last fall, my roommates went to a country music festival, and I went with them."

"Do you like country music?"

She almost laughed at the recollection of how miserable she had been during the event because of the immense crowds and the music. Though the style was not something she would listen to on her own, it was more the volume of it she objected to while at the festival. "Not really but since I'd never been to a concert, they said I should go."

"That was nice of them." Then, as he casually picked up his ball so he could begin his turn, he told her, "I'd be happy to take you to do other things you haven't done. Pick a sport and we'll play it, though fair warning I will probably be terrible at it."

Feeling a little embarrassed, she gazed down towards the ground and scuffed the toe of her bowling shoe against the wood. "You don't have to."

He threw his ball, resulting in knocking down three pins, and then turned back to her. "Something else then. Ah… what about an amusement park? Have you ever been on a rollercoaster?"

"No."

"Do you want to?"

"I don't know."

"Well, there are other rides—less intimidating ones," he said in a jokey tone. After his ball returned to the holding slot, he picked it up and threw it again, that time knocking down an additional five pins. "Oh, I know—how about a museum? We might have to go into Philadelphia, but that's not that far of a drive."

"I—I just…how many more practice dates can we go on?" She asked. Then, upon hearing her tone out loud, she feared it may have sounded unkind and unappreciative, which made her feel worse, so she quickly added, "Sorry—I'm not trying to be rude. I just…don't understand why you're still helping me."

Truly, she did not understand why he was still taking her on pretend dates. Taking her out to dinner once was a kindness far beyond what she felt she deserved. Now, not only were they on their third practice date, but the way he was talking he intended to take her on at least once more—if not more than one! Of course, she appreciated what he had done for her; she truly felt the dates had helped her feel more at ease while alone with a man she didn't know very well, but she had also begun to feel guilty. For that date in particular, he'd needed to hire a babysitter for Tim and he'd paid for everything to that point, which made it seem more like…well, a real date, and since they weren't actually dating she did not think he needed to continue wasting his time and money on her.

He slipped his hands down into his pockets as he gazed at her. With a bit of a shrug he confessed, "I don't know. Because I enjoy it? It's…nice to watch someone experience something new. It's what I like most about fatherhood."

Her brow winkled, not entirely sure how to interpret such a statement. Fortunately, it seemed Patrick quickly realized his error and said, "Er…well, now I've made myself sound like your parent so let me explain at the risk of jamming my foot further into my mouth. Watching a child discover and explore something new is fascinating because inevitably they'll ask you questions you never thought of—sometimes making you rethink the entire experience. The joy they experience with those discoveries is something you simply cannot replicate.

"For instance, two weeks ago, Tim was visiting one of the friends he made at camp and that boy's father had a record player. Tim had never seen one before and it was as though he'd discovered the moon. He talked about it for days. It got me thinking…as adults we don't ever have those experiences. Sure, when I get my next iPhone there might be a new feature that makes me say, 'Oh, that's interesting,' but it's not the same as encountering something so new to you that you had no idea such a thing could exist. We're saturated with all these screens and media and noise…there's no new discoveries, not really." He quirked his lips to one side and finished with, "I suppose, that's a very long way of saying I enjoy watching you discover things. I like seeing the look on your face when you…get a strike in bowling."

Upon hearing his words, Shelagh felt a strange pressure in her chest that she had never felt before. It wasn't a bad feeling, just new. It felt rather warm and pleasant. Though she didn't understand it, she did not want Patrick to think he had upset her, so she managed to force out, "Well, that's something I'll never do again," to lighten the mood.

He grinned. "Well, you don't know that—after all, it's your turn again."

Half an hour later, they were seated at a high-top table near the bar inside the bowling alley, splitting an order of nachos that Shelagh insisted on paying for. The remainder of their bowling game had been mostly uninteresting, with neither of them knocking down more than a handful of pins on each turn. Patrick had offered to pay for another round, but Shelagh said they didn't have to, and he took her lack of enthusiasm to be a polite rejection and instead suggested they grab a bite to eat to continue their date.

"Tim told me you grew up in England, can I ask where?"

"I lived in Wembley, which is just outside of London, until I was fourteen when I moved to the States."

"Did your father get a job here?"

Patrick found himself slightly surprised that she didn't know much of his background despite them knowing each other for almost the entire summer. Granted, almost all their conversations prior to the practice dates had been entirely focused on Tim. Leaning back in his seat, he began to explain his family history as succinctly as he could. "No, actually, my father is American, and my mother was British. They met in Philadelphia while she was on a study abroad trip and after going home with her classmates, she came immediately back to be with him. They had me about a year later, but quickly realized it was not going to work out, so she went back home and took me with her."

"Oh, wow."

"My father came to visit me for a week every summer and a few times I spent the Christmas holidays with him here, but that was pretty much all I saw of him until one day my mother told me we were moving to America. What I soon found out was that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer."

Shelagh's expression fell. "Oh no."

Patrick shifted uncomfortably in his seats as the memories of that difficult time resurfaced in his mind. "To his credit, as soon as he found out, my father paid for her to come here and get the best treatment possible…but she only lived for another year."

"I'm so sorry."

"Thank you. It was certainly a difficult time in my life, though, in hindsight I feel lucky to have had fifteen years with her versus Timothy's seven years with his mother. His grandparents—that is, Marianne's parents—wanted to take custody him so he didn't have to change schools, but I…I couldn't allow it. History was already repeating itself too much. I had to be the father mine wasn't, even if it feels like I'm failing most days."

Though of course he would have never wished for it, he was grateful that Marianne's death had come after a nearly year-long reckoning he'd faced in trying not to become his father. It had all started shortly after Tim's sixth birthday when he'd gone to pick him up for the weekend assuming nothing out of the ordinary, only for the boy to stroll out of his mother's house with five stiches in a gash on his forehead and half his face black-and-blue. When he asked what happened, Marianne said he fell on the playground at school, though her tone indicated a level of casualty that would have barely warranted a Band-Aid let alone stitches. When he'd spluttered out his confusion at not being informed, she merely shrugged and said, "It wasn't that serious, and I didn't think you'd care."

Her words hit him like a bag of bricks to the chest.

That night, as Timothy slept on the air mattress in the otherwise empty guest room of his Philadelphia apartment, Patrick began searching for available positions at hospitals or practices near where Marianne lived, which was about sixty miles northwest of his current location. The distance was not insurmountable when only seeing Tim two or three times a month, but that was not the kind of father he wanted to be—not anymore.

Patrick could not remember one occasion of truly bonding with his father when he was younger. His father had been there for him in superficial ways—buying him presents, paying for his schooling, and offering to buy him more elaborate things like cars and motorcycles (once he was in his teens, of course). In fact, he had only one positive memory of his father before he was ten years old. It was the first Christmas he had visited him in the states, and he was quite anxious and missing his mother. His father had taken him on the train to New York City to see the tree in Rockefeller Center. Since he was used to going into London, the noise of the city didn't bother him, but the crowds of foreign-sounding voices did have him a bit on edge. His father had picked him up and put him up on his shoulders so he could see the tree better. He remembered leaning forward and hugging his father round the chin, feeling for the first time like he actually had a father. The last thing he wanted was for his son to have similar sentiments.

Within a few months, Patrick had found his job in Malven, which was only about half as close to Tim as he'd wanted to move, but he didn't want to wait any longer to spend more time with his son. He sold his apartment and moved to a house with a yard where Tim could play and had hoped to renegotiate their custody agreement so it was more evenly split, but Marianne continued to push off the discussion and then she had her accident and everything changed. More than anything he hated the fact that history was repeating itself in the worst of ways, but he knew he would do absolutely anything to make Tim's life the best it could be given the circumstances.

"You're not failing," Shelagh assured him kindly.

He gave her a wry smile. "You haven't seen all the t-shirts I've shrank in the laundry."

"No, but I know how much you care and that already means you're doing better than most."

He hummed and popped a rather soggy chip into his mouth before thanking her and adding, "Sorry for bringing down the mood of the evening."

"Oh no not at all!"

He gazed at her for a moment and then said without thinking, "You're very easy to talk to."

A slight blush crept into her cheeks as she confessed, "I've heard that before."

"It's true. A very admirable quality."

She nibbled on one of the nachos for a moment before saying, "Can I ask another question?"

"Of course."

"If you've been here since you were fourteen, wouldn't, I mean, why do you still have such a strong accent?"

He took in a slow breath through his nose, straightened his expression as best he could, and then said with his best Americanized tone, "What accent are you talking about?"

Her face lit up just as he hoped it would. "Oh my! You sounded a bit southern."

He laughed and explained with, "My grandmother is from Georgia originally. But to your point…I don't know." He scrubbed his fingers over his chin as he thought; no one had asked him about his accent before and he never really gave it much thought. "I suppose by fourteen you're pretty set in your way of speaking. I went to an American high school and initially tried to start speaking like my peers, but…well, the girls seemed to like my accent, so I stopped trying to speak differently. Then, by coincidence, my roommate in undergrad was a Londoner so that just reinforced it. Though, actually this is a bit of a funny story, when I was doing my training in emergency medicine, my attending was so furious with me because I would mostly speak like this, but if I say something like…I don't know, tachycardia…"

Again, her face lit up. "Oh! Because you were taught by someone with an American accent."

"Exactly. The way I pronounce medical terms is really all over the map—literally. Anyway, the attending insisted that in an emergency room setting a mixed accent might be rather confusion for the injured and distressed American patient. That was the only time I really tried to speak more like my father, but…I don't think I was very good at it."

He picked up another chip, but when the slimy cheese hit his tongue, he nearly gagged. Barely managing to swallow, as he thought it impolite to spit into a napkin, he coughed out, "This food is terrible. Shall we go someplace else?"

She shrugged. "If you want."

Grinning, he slid off his chair, and said with a flourish, "C'mon Shelagh; let's see where the night takes us."