The Song Two Hundred Guests Finished

The next dance

The guests in their navy and rust shuffled back to make a ring on the lawn again. Nobody said a word. Even the baby by the coolers had gone quiet.

Paula put her hand in mine. It was ice cold and it was shaking.

I put my other hand on her back and felt how stiff she was, like a fence post somebody had just set in concrete.

Alonzo looked at me and I nodded. He played something slow and old, a country waltz my mother loved, nothing that would hurt anybody.

I did not even know what it was until the steel guitar came in.

We took three steps. Paula was a better dancer than me. She had been a square dancer at the Rush County fair when she was young, Whit told me later.

Her feet knew what to do even when the rest of her did not.

Then she put her mouth close to my ear, and I felt her whole body start to shake.

“Eloise,” she whispered, “you need to know why I did that. I’m so sorry. I can’t say it here. Not in front of everybody. Can I tell you later? Tonight?”

“Tonight,” I said. “I’ll find you.”

She nodded against my shoulder. We finished the dance. When it was over, the whole yard clapped, and this time it felt right to clap.

Paula let go of my hands and walked straight off the lawn toward the parking area by the road.

Whit went after her. He came back ten minutes later and told me she was sitting in her car, not crying, just sitting.

He said she had asked him to let her be for a while.

“Did she tell you anything?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “She said she has to tell you first. Eloise, I’m sorry. I didn’t know what song you picked. If I had, I’d have warned you.”

I did not understand that yet. Warned me about what?

The rest of the night

A wedding does not stop for anybody’s heart. The cake still had to be served. The coolers still needed ice.

My bridesmaids still wanted the line dance, and Alonzo played it, and we did it, and I laughed for real in the middle of it.

Uncle Woody found me by the pie table around ten. He had a slice of sugar cream pie on a paper plate and two forks.

He handed me one and we ate standing up, the way Dad and he used to eat at the fair.

“Your dad would’ve been proud of you,” he said. “Not for the dance. For what you did after.”

“I didn’t do anything,” I said.

“You held out your hand,” he said. “Most people would’ve held out something else.”

Elva came running up with frosting on her chin and asked if she did good. I knelt down in my gown in the grass and hugged her so hard her basket bent.

“You did the best of anybody,” I told her. “You started it. Grandpa Wiley would have picked you up and spun you around.”

“He used to do that,” she said, very seriously. “I was littler then.”

People started leaving around midnight. The farmers went first, because some of them still had beans to cut on Monday.

The young people stayed and sat on the hay bales by the fire pit, and Alonzo played softer and softer until he finally packed it in.

I helped him wind the cord. He kept apologizing. I told him he had nothing to be sorry for. He was a kid in a hard spot, and he had not pulled anything.

“She paid me,” he said, miserable. “She told me to keep to the list. I didn’t know what to do.”

“You did fine,” I said. “Next time, look at the bride.”

He laughed a little at that, and some of the worry went out of his shoulders.

I gave him an extra fifty dollars in an envelope that I had been saving for the band that cancelled, and told him to go get breakfast.