The Man in Row Three

The lobby

When the recital let out, I went out through the lobby to the parking lot. I was not trying to find Shayla. I want to be clear about that.

I was trying to get out of everybody’s way before Ava came out of the dressing room and there was trouble about it.

Shayla was standing behind the folding table where she’d been selling flowers, packing the leftover bunches into a cardboard box.

She saw me and put down the box. For a second we just stood there with the families streaming out between us.

Then she came around the table. Her mascara had run. She said, “I watched it through the door. All of it.” I said I hadn’t planned that, and I hadn’t told Ava to do it, and if it made trouble for her, I was sorry.

She shook her head. She said, “I made her practice it, Jake. Goodbye forever. In the bathroom mirror. Three nights in a row before her birthday, so she’d say it right. Kyle said if I didn’t cut you off, he was done. I’d already lost two people. I couldn’t lose a third.”

I said, “You didn’t lose me. I was right there the whole time.” She said, “I know. Every Saturday. In that stupid gray shirt.” She laughed a little and wiped her nose on the back of her wrist. “He left anyway. He left anyway, and you didn’t.”

I didn’t say I told you so. I didn’t feel it. Mostly I felt sorry for her, and for the girl she’d been at nine when her own dad walked out.

Then she said it. She said, “Would you keep coming? Not just to dance. Wednesdays, like before. Her birthday. All of it. She needs you. I think I’ve known that since December, since the bow.” Her voice broke on it. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Jake.”

I told her yes. Of course yes. I told her I would never be anywhere else. And I told her the one thing I’d been wanting to say since September, which was that she’d been a good mother to Ava every Saturday she brought her through that studio door when she could have kept her home.

She cried harder at that. Then Ava came running out of the dressing room hallway still in her pink costume with her roses, and she stopped short when she saw the two of us standing together, like she couldn’t believe it, and then she grabbed both of our hands at once.

After

That was a year ago this May. I see Ava every other weekend again, and Wednesday nights, and I tie her bow for school pictures.

We don’t have a judge’s piece of paper. We have something better, which is her mother’s word, and we’ve both kept it.

I never went back to sending Shayla seven hundred dollars a month. Instead, every August I walk into Miss Renee’s studio and write a check for the next year of dance.

This year it went up to one thousand and eighty, because tuition went up five dollars a month and the costumes and the recital fee went up five dollars apiece.

Shayla and I are not getting back together, and nobody needs to wait on that. She’s seeing a nice man who teaches shop class at the high school, and he shook my hand at Ava’s ninth birthday party and said, “Heard a lot about you.” I said I hoped some of it was good.

Kim still saves my chair. Miss Renee still tells every new parent in her studio that whoever pays the bill is family as far as her chairs are concerned, and she looks at me when she says it, and I look at the floor.

Ava is nine now. She’s moved up to the intermediate class, and she says next year she wants to try jazz.

When she finds me before every routine, she still taps her nose and wiggles four fingers, and I still wiggle mine back.

The spring recital is in two weeks. Same high school auditorium, same stage lights, same tan purse on the same seat.

I’ll stop at the grocery store on the highway on the way in.

If you go, you’ll know me. I’m the one Ava finds first, every single time. I’m the man with a bouquet of grocery-store roses in row three.