The Dance Her Father Saved

The coat room

I found Regina at twenty minutes to ten, in the hallway outside the coat room, where the carpet turned from patterned to plain.

She was alone. One hair of the silver bob was out of place, and I had never seen that before.

“Lorene.” She did not touch her pearls. Her hands hung at her sides. “I have been trying for an hour to think what to say, and I find I have never written an apology that was not already finished.”

“Then say it unfinished.”

“My father died when I was nine,” she said. “A tractor, on our place outside Concordia. They brought him in on a door. My mother put me in the kitchen with a casserole dish and told me to wash it, and she said, ‘We don’t carry on in front of people, Regina.’ I washed that dish for three hours. It is the longest I have ever cried, and the only time I did it with the water running.”

I said nothing. A person should be allowed to finish.

“I have spent fifty-one years believing that was manners. When I saw that dance in the program, I could not stand it. I told myself it was for the guests. It was for me. I could not sit in a room where a girl did the thing I was never allowed to do.” She breathed. “And I paid for the room. Some part of me thought that bought me a vote. I have heard men say that exact sentence, and despised them.”

She looked at me, and her eyes were very clear and very tired.

“When he said take your shoes off, nobody in that room will mind, I thought, I have minded for fifty-one years. I would like to stop.”

“I won’t tell you it was small,” I said. “It was a dying man’s last present to his girl, and you took scissors to it, quietly, in gold ink. I forgive you. I may not manage it by Monday, but I’ll do the work, because Katie will need her mother-in-law in the room at Christmas.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Katie is the one who’s owed, and you’ll tell her yourself, and not tonight. And a hundred and forty people were told a dead man’s name would make them uncomfortable.” I held her eyes. “You put it right where you put it wrong.”

Regina Whitlock nodded once. “Yes,” she said. “I will.”

She turned to go, and then turned back. “You never raised your voice. I kept waiting for it. Why?”

“Because Sam loved that girl out loud for twenty-seven years,” I said. “I figured I could stand a quiet afternoon.”