The Dance Her Father Saved

The kitchen floor

Katie did not wait for Wendell to ask her.

She walked to him across the parquet in her stocking feet, and she looked up at her uncle, who has her father’s jaw and her father’s ears, and she said, in a voice so small I only knew it from her lips, “Hold his place, Uncle Wendell.”

He said, “I’ve got it, honey.”

She stepped up onto his shoes.

She stood on the toes of his good black dress shoes, in her gown, with her arms around his neck, exactly as she had stood on her father’s boots when she was six, and Wendell Hadley, who had climbed forty years of poles and never once been afraid of a hundred and fifteen thousand volts, began to cry like a boy.

“One,” he whispered. “Two. Three.”

He could do a box step. He could almost do a turn. He did the turn.

June stood at the edge of the floor with both hands pressed to her chest, and beside her the Methodist ladies, crying in a row like the choir.

Then, one at a time, the Hallam couples stepped out onto the floor. Dale Brandt put his arm around his wife and danced with her for the first time in fifteen years. They made a slow ring around Wendell and Katie, and nobody said a thing.

Then the Wichita people came. I will give them that. The hospital auxiliary women, in their silk, with their husbands in their blazers, stepped into the ring without being asked, and one of them, a stout woman with a diamond brooch, wiped her face with the back of her wrist and kept right on dancing.

About halfway through, Wendell’s hip caught. His face tightened and his step went short, and he did not stop, because he had been told to hold a place, and a lineman does not leave a pole because his leg hurts.

A big hand came onto his shoulder.

“Wendell.” It was Gordon Whitlock. He had come across the floor in his good suit, his big, vague, kind face wet to the collar. “My name is Gordon. I’m the other fella’s father. I saw that card come back from the printer Thursday, and I read it, and I said nothing. I’ve been quiet about a good many things in thirty-eight years of marriage, and I am tired of it. Would you let me stand in for the last minute? You’ve earned a chair.”

Wendell looked at him. He looked at Katie.

“Go on, Uncle Wendell,” Katie said, still standing on his shoes. “You held it.”

Wendell kissed her forehead, hard. Then he stepped off and let Gordon Whitlock, orthodontist, take his place, and he walked to June with one hand on his hip, and she put both arms around him.

Gordon was terrible at it. Katie stood on his shoes too, and the room, which was crying, laughed.

Then the steel guitar held its last long note, and for perhaps five seconds there was no sound at all.

Then a hundred and forty people began to clap. It went on for a long time. It did not stop until Shelby Dunn leaned into her microphone, her own face shining, and said, “Well. Mr. Hadley is all out of requests. We’re going to do a polka.”

Everybody laughed, and the breath went out of the room, and the band struck up.

Dylan found me at the edge of the floor and lifted me clean off the carpet, a thing no one had done since Sam. “I should have read the card,” he said into my hair.

“You’ll read the next one,” I said. “That is all anybody asks.”