The Dance Her Father Saved

The long dinner

The Hallam tables were spread across the back of the room, nine through twelve, and by the time the salads came the word had gone around them as quietly as a casserole at a church supper. Dale told his wife, who told Marge, who told the Methodist ladies at table eleven, and every one of them put down her fork and looked at me and nodded once.

No one made a speech. That is not how my people do things. They simply turned their chairs a few degrees toward the dance floor, like a field of sunflowers all deciding the same thing.

I sat at the head table between Katie and Dylan’s father, Gordon, an orthodontist and a good, large, vague man who kept glancing at me. He knew something was moving around him that he had not been told about.

Regina gave the toast at a quarter to seven. She did not say Sam’s name. She did not say the word father. She said, “Those we have lost are with us in spirit,” in a voice so light and smooth that I understood, for the first time, that she had practiced it.

The room clapped.

I gave my own toast in ninety seconds. I did not mention Sam. I did not look at Regina. I sat down, and Katie’s hand found mine under the tablecloth, cold as a creek.

At seven-thirty the cake was cut, an ivory four-tier with sugar magnolias. Katie and Dylan fed each other with their eyes closed. Shelby Dunn stepped to the microphone and said, “Folks, we’ll start the dancing with the mother and son.”

Katie leaned over and whispered, “Mama. Now?”

“Not yet,” I said. “Let her have her dance first. We wait our turn.”

The mother-son dance was in the program, and Regina should have it. I would not take one dance from her to give one to Katie.

Dylan and Regina danced to a song I did not know, very properly, a good six inches apart. The room clapped. And I saw her look, just for a second, toward the back of the room, where sixty-one people from Hallam sat with their hands in their laps and said nothing at all.

She looked away first.