The Man in Row Three

Every Saturday

So every Saturday at nine, Shayla had to walk into that studio and see me in the third row. That was the cost to her, and I won’t pretend I didn’t know it.

She had shut a door on me, and now she had to sit two rows in front of me for an hour every week.

She stopped getting my seven hundred dollars on the first of the month, too. I never said a word to her about the checks.

They just stopped coming. I’m told she had to pick up Thursday evenings at the dental office to make it up, and Kyle started picking up overtime.

I want to be fair to her about something. She never once told Ava not to dance because I was there. She could have.

It would have been easy. She kept bringing her every Saturday, rain or snow, and I think that was the first sign that the mother I knew was still in there.

For the first six weeks, Ava did not look at me once. She would come in holding her mother’s hand and go straight to the barre, and at the end she would go straight back out.

I told myself it was enough just to see her doing what she loved.

The other mothers figured it out pretty quick. It’s a small town. Everybody knows who used to be married to who. A woman named Kim, who had twin girls in the class, sat down next to me the third Saturday and said, “You’re Ava’s stepdad, aren’t you?” I said I used to be.

Kim didn’t ask me anything else that day. But the next Saturday when I came in, there was a big tan purse sitting on my chair in the third row by the window, and Kim moved it to her lap when she saw me and said, “Saved your seat.”

After that it was every week. Kim, or her friend Amy, or a dad named Tom who drove a feed truck and came on his days off with his little girl, would put a purse or a jacket or a thermos on that one folding chair until I got there. Nobody ever made a speech about it.

Tom said to me once, out in the parking lot, “My first wife left with my boy when he was five. I had a judge. You don’t. I’d have done exactly what you’re doing.” Then he got in his truck and that was the most we ever said about it.