The Hour in the Sun
Saturday afternoon, the fourteenth, I drove to the hall at a quarter to one. The band practices every other Saturday, and since Dolores died, I had gone to the practices to sit on the bench by the bass, as I had on Fridays.
The hall in the daytime is a different place. The sun comes in through those tall windows and lies across the maple floor in long white bars. You can see the dust in the air. The pressed-tin ceiling that is dim and brown at night turns out to be painted white, and the stage curtain is a faded green you would never know by lamplight.
Gerda was already there with Sheryl, who had stayed over in her old room. The girl had on a navy vest and held a paper cup in both hands, and she was looking at the floor the way a person looks at a pond she has been told to cross.
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Gerda and I took one turn, and then another. Sheryl watched. Then she said, “Show me. The count. The tapping.”
I have never been prouder of anything than the way Gerda answered, which was to say, “Come here,” as simply as she must have said it to her daughter fifty times about fifty smaller things.
She took Sheryl’s hand and set it on my right shoulder. I held very still. A man who has lived with cattle knows how to hold still for somebody who is afraid.
“Here,” Gerda said. “Where the blade is. Light. Like a bird landing.”
Sheryl’s fingers were cold through my shirt. She tapped me once, much too hard, and winced. “Lighter,” Gerda said. She tapped again. She tapped a third time.
I felt that. It was a different hand, a younger hand, an unsteady hand, but it was in the right place on my back and it fell exactly on the beat.
Odell started a waltz.
I lifted my right hand. Sheryl set down her coffee, stepped in stiff as a fence post and took hold of me.
“One, two, three,” said Sheryl.
She said it aloud. She said it, I understood, on purpose, loud enough for a man with one tired ear. I heard it. I heard every word of it, every number, in a young woman’s voice, because she had put her mouth up near the side of my head and had the sense to say it slow.
One. Two. Three.
We went down the length of the floor in the white light of a November afternoon with the band laboring away on the stage and Gerda following, laughing, her hand over her mouth.