The Last Waltz I Saved for Vonnie

“I know it is.” He put the flannel in his pocket and looked past me, across the hall. I turned. It was Iola, by the door, with her hand over her mouth. When she saw me looking she dropped it and fiddled with her scarf.

“Is something going on?” I said.

“It’s your wife’s birthday,” Marlin said. “I’m a little sentimental. Humor me.”

What else was I going to say?

The second set was the longest of my life. I noticed things I hadn’t in a year: that Elton wasn’t watching his steel, he was watching me, and that Bonnie, who always sings with her eyes closed, had hers open.

I noticed that Dean Hartzler had gotten up from the table and was standing by the door on his bad ankle with the face of a man who had been told to hold something very heavy and not set it down.

And I noticed that people were moving. It was so gradual I didn’t see it until it was nearly done. The couples had stopped dancing and were drifting to the sides. Ruthann Pickett and her husband had taken a table by the east wall and sat with their hands in their laps. The young ones had gathered at the bar rail.

At ten-forty, Marlin laid his fiddle across his knee.

I had never seen him do that. In thirty-eight years he had played the last number standing.

Bonnie leaned her bass against the amplifier. Elton lifted his foot off the pedal. The hall went silent, not the way it does when a song ends, but the way a room goes quiet when somebody important has come in.

Marlin leaned to the microphone. He did not say, Find somebody you like.

“Folks,” he said. “I’ve got a request slip here.”

He reached into his fiddle case and took out a small piece of paper folded in quarters, soft as cloth from handling. It was one of the pink slips they hand out at the door, with the line across the top. Vonnie used to hand those out.

“It came to me in January of last year,” Marlin said, “from a lady who couldn’t be here. She asked me to hold it. She said I’d know when to read it. I have carried it a year and nine months, and I believe tonight’s the night.”

I could not move. I want to be exact about that. I stood with my hat and could not make my feet go either way.

He unfolded the slip and read the top of it.

“It says: Marlin. Please play ours. Slow. Clear the floor and let him have all of it. Do not let anybody cut in. He will tell you he is quitting. Do not believe him. That is your night.”

He lowered the paper. “It’s signed. You all know the name.”

Then everybody in the hall stood up.

They stood up from the folding tables and the bar rail and the chairs along the wall. They stood the way you stand in church when the family comes in. Some had a husband’s hand or a wife’s. Some held their hats. I saw Gus Adler, ninety-one years old, push himself up out of his chair on the strength of his arms and his stubbornness, and his granddaughter did not try to stop him.

And they walked to the edge.