The Red Dress at the VFW Hall

The First Slow Song

After the supper plates were cleared, the band set up in the corner.

It was four men about Harold’s age from the next county, who play every wedding and anniversary within fifty miles. They wore matching black vests.

The bandleader tapped the microphone and said congratulations to Harold and Marlene, fifty years. Everybody clapped. He said they would start with something slow, for the happy couple.

Marlene and Harold were supposed to dance first. That was the plan. But when the band started playing, Marlene did not get up.

She sat there with her hand at her collar, and Harold leaned down and said something to her, and she shook her head a little.

Harold listened to whatever she said next with his face going slowly red.

Then he stood up, set his napkin on his chair, and walked off toward the end of the bar without a word to anybody.

The song kept playing. Nobody moved. It got awkward, the way it does when a band plays to an empty floor. The bandleader glanced over at the front table.

Nick stood up. He buttoned his navy sport coat. He held out his hand to me.

“Dance with me,” he said.

I put my hand in his. We walked out to the middle of that tile floor under the string lights, and he put his hand on my back, and we danced.

The Empty Floor

Nobody else came out. Nobody. The floor stayed empty all the way around us, and I could feel every eye in that hall on my bare head. It felt like standing in a cold wind.

I kept my eyes on Nick. He held me close and moved slow, a little stiff, the way he has always danced. He smelled like the aftershave he only wears to weddings.

“Everybody’s looking,” I whispered.

“Let them look,” he said. “Prettiest girl in the room.”

I laughed into his shoulder. Then I stopped thinking about the room.

I thought about the day we got married in the Lutheran church on Main, when I was twenty-two and he was twenty-five, and how scared we both were.

Then a chair scraped. I heard it over the music. I looked past Nick’s shoulder and saw an old couple from Harold’s card club, Don and Shirley, standing up from their table.

They came out on the floor. Shirley was eighty if she was a day, and she walked with a cane.

She hooked the cane on the back of a chair and took Don’s hand, and they danced about ten feet from us.

Then another couple got up. Then three more. Old couples, mostly, the ones who had known Nick since he was a baby.

Walt pulled his wife out of her chair. Brenda and her husband came out.

By the end of the song, there must have been fifteen couples on that floor around us. Nobody said anything about it. They just danced. Shirley caught my eye once and winked.

I looked over at the front table. Marlene had not moved. She sat very still, with her hand at her collar, and she watched me dance with her son.