Page 6 of Crazy Imperfect Hearts

“No.”

“Lucas, hand them over.”

He steps back and stretches his arms out to his sides. “Come get ‘em if you want ‘em.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“Come on. It’s your birthday. Lemme buy you a drink.”

He’s right. Itismy birthday. At least for another forty-five minutes. Ava’s words about me being thirty-five and having a bedtime weave through my head. I hold up a finger. “One drink. But I doubt Cooper would serve you. We’ll have to go to the bar in the bowling alley.”

He glances next door to Calloway Bowl, which shares the huge parking lot with Donovan’s and the other establishments lining this side of McQuaid Circle. “A drink is a drink. Don’t care where I get it.”

Clearly inebriated, he takes the large gift bag from me and I follow him across the parking lot.

“I can’t remember the last time I’ve been in here,” I say when we enter.

The sound of pins crashing together when a bowling ball hits them thunders through the front doors.

Calloway Bowl only has ten lanes, and even at that, it’s a rarity that all of them are occupied. It has a small café with mostly fried food and pizza, and a bar with exactly five stools, all empty since most people do their drinking next door.

Three lanes are being used. One by Tag Calloway’s—and I suppose Lucas’s—cousins (they’re all related somehow), Gray, Colt, and Storm. Another by a group of girls from CCU summer school probably—all of them flirting with the handsome Calloway brothers next to them. There is a couple on the last one, the far lane at the very end. The guy is helping her bowl as if she’s new to it. He’s behind her, and the very large grin on her face tells me she might just know how to do it but is having too much fun to tell him.

Lucas sets my bag next to the bar. Monty Langston—owner and, at the moment, sole worker here—comes out from behind the main counter and steps behind the bar.

Monty is old. Pushing eighty I’d guess. I pretty much know everyone who works or owns businesses along McQuaid Circle as my own bookstore/boutique is one of those businesses. Like mine and Maddie’s, a lot of them have been handed down from generation to generation. Monty, though, is the original owner of the bowling alley. He doesn’t have kids, has never been married, and as far as I know, is always working.

I stare at him and wonder if this is who I’ll be in forty-five years.

“Why, Regan Lucas,” Monty says reverently. “I haven’t seen you in here in a long while. You’re looking sweeter than stolen honey. What can I get you?”

“Thank you, Monty. I’ll have white wine please, whatever you have opened is fine.”

Lucas scoffs next to me. “Swill, most likely,” he mumbles.

I kick him in the shin. “Be nice,” I say under my breath.

“I’m just saying, there’s a winery close by, yet he doesn’t stock any of our wine.”

“Soon as you offer a more economical option, I’ll be happy to stock it,” Monty says.

“Economical,” Lucas says like it’s a bad word. “You mean cheap.”

“Son, this is a bowling alley. My budget is as tight as a fiddle string. And you can bet on the fact that folks don’t come here for expensive booze.”

Lucas shakes his head and leans across the bar in a determined yet non-threatening manner. “Please don’t refer to my wine as booze, old man. People drink booze to get drunk. My wine is meant to be savored.”

“I tell you what,” Monty says, not intimidated in the least. “I won’t call your wine booze and you don’t call me old man and we’ll call it even.”

I put a hand on Lucas’s shoulder and urge him back onto the barstool. “Sounds like a good plan.”

Monty pours my wine and stares Lucas down. “You drinkin’ or what?”

“What’s the best you got?”

Monty looks behind him. “Patrón Silver.”

Lucas whistles in jest. “A forty-dollar bottle of tequila?” He pulls out his phone. “Let me check my account to see if I can swing it.”

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