The Night Grandpa Harold Danced

The lesson

My grandfather pushed his bowl away and looked at Jason for a long time.

“Your dad ever teach you to dance?” he asked.

“No, sir.”

“Mine didn’t either,” my grandfather said. “I learned in that barn from my sister, with the cows watching, because I wanted to ask a girl at the Sweetheart Dance.”

He looked over at my grandmother, who was standing at the stove pretending not to listen.

“I looked like a fool anyway,” he said. “She said yes regardless.”

My grandmother made a small noise and turned the burner off under nothing. Jason looked up. His eyes were red.

“Would you teach me?” he said.

My grandfather did not answer right away. He took the walker by the grips and stood up from the table, slow, the way he does everything now.

“Mae,” he said. “Put the radio on.”

And that is how I came to see my ex-husband, thirty eight years old, in his sock feet on my grandmother’s kitchen linoleum, being taught to box step by an eighty eight year old man with a walker.

My grandfather showed him with the walker. Slide, step, turn. Then Jason would try it, and do it wrong, and they would start over.

“Your weight’s all in your heels,” my grandfather said. “You’re standing like you’re waiting for a load to dump. Get up on the balls of your feet.”

“Like this?”

“No. Mae, show him.”

My grandmother came over in her house slippers, all five feet one of her, took Jason’s hands, and walked him through it twice. On the third time around he got it.

“There,” she said. “Now you’re dancing. Badly. But you’re dancing.”

I was laughing and crying at the same time. That was when Ellie came down the stairs.

Ellie

She was in flannel pajamas from a drawer upstairs with the sleeves rolled three times, her curls flat on one side. She stopped on the bottom step and looked at her father, in his socks, holding her great grandmother’s hands.

Nobody moved. The radio kept playing some old song about a train.

“You said Amber had plans,” Ellie said.

It was not loud. She was not crying. She just said it, the way you would read something off a sign. Jason let go. He did not come toward her. He stayed where he was, and I think that was the smartest thing he did all morning.

“I did,” he said. “I said that. It was wrong. I should have been there, Ellie. I’m sorry.”

He did not say “but.” I listened for it, and it did not come. Ellie looked at him for a long time.

“Grandpa Harold already took me,” she said. “He danced every song. Mr. Peterson counted.”

“I know,” Jason said. “I heard. I heard from a lot of people.”

“He let me stand on his shoes.”

“I heard that too.”

She thought about that. Then she said, “You can’t dance.”

“No,” Jason said. “That’s why I’m here. Grandpa Harold’s teaching me.” He swallowed. “There’s another one next February. If you’ll let me take you, I’ll be ready. And if you want Grandpa Harold instead, I’ll understand.”

My daughter is my daughter. She did not run to him. She did not say yes. She came down off the bottom step, walked past him, and climbed up into the chair next to my grandfather.

“Can I have oatmeal?” she asked my grandmother.

“With brown sugar?”

“Please.”

Then, with her back to her father, while my grandmother was getting a bowl down from the cupboard, she said, “I’ll think about it.” Jason closed his eyes for a second. Then he said, “Okay. That’s fair.”

He stayed for breakfast, then drove me and Ellie to town to get my car from the school lot. On the way, Ellie talked to him. Not much. But she talked.