Chapter 8
The memory of Dolly’s dinner still warms me three days later when I think about it.
I had arrived at the yellow house with the wind chimes at exactly six o’clock because punctuality is one habit I can’t break.
I clutched a bottle of wine I’d driven forty-five minutes to find because the Copper Creek grocery store selection consisted entirely of something called Arbor Mist and a suspicious-looking Merlot with a screw cap.
Dolly had taken one look at my expensive Cabernet and laughed.
“Honey, we’re having sweet tea and fried chicken, but I appreciate the effort.”
The house was small but immaculate, every surface covered with photographs and knick-knacks and the accumulated treasures of a life well lived. The dining room was set for six: Dolly, me, Presley, Boone, and, to my surprise, Wyatt with his grandmother, Meredith.
Meredith was a tiny woman with silver hair and the exact same eyes in the exact same shade of blue as her grandson’s. She studied me with frank curiosity when we were introduced, her handshake firm despite the fact that she had obvious arthritis.
“Oh, so you’re the one who’s got my Wyatt all tied up in knots,” she’d said.
My face felt like it was on fire, and Wyatt made a strangled sound of protest.
“Grandma!”
“Hush. I’m old. I’m allowed to say what I see.” She patted my hand. “Don’t worry, dear. He needed some knots. He’s been too settled for too long.”
I didn’t know what she meant by any of that. Wyatt wasn’t interested in me. I’m the woman who drives him crazy, picking apart menu grammar and insulting pudding all over town. Why was I tying him up in knots? I decide that Meredith is mistaken and just ribbing her grandson at my expense.
The dinner itself had been a revelation. Not the food, although Dolly’s fried chicken was transcendent. The conversation. The easy flow of it. The way everyone talked over each other, laughed at inside jokes, and included me without making me feel like an outsider.
Presley told a story about a customer who tried to pay his tab with a live chicken.
“He was completely serious,” she said. “Said it was worth at least forty dollars. And that chicken was as ugly as homemade sin, I’m telling ya!”
Boone shared, in his quiet way, that he’d finally finished the rocking chair he’d been building for months.
Meredith regaled us with tales of teaching elementary school for forty years.
“Oh, the children never change,” she said. “The parents just get worse every generation.”
And Wyatt watched me across the table with an expression I couldn’t quite read. He jumped in to explain references I didn’t understand, made sure my sweet tea glass stayed full, and caught my eye during funny moments to check if I was enjoying myself.
And I was.
That was the strangest part. I was genuinely, uncomplicatedly enjoying myself.
At one point, Dolly brought out a photo album with pictures of The Rusty Spur through the years, of Mavis at different ages, of the staff and regulars who had become family.
I found myself leaning in, hungry for glimpses of the aunt I never knew.
Dolly narrated each image with the kind of love that made my throat tight.
“Now this one was her sixtieth birthday. We surprised her with a mariachi band. I don’t even know where Wyatt found them, but they drove three hours to get here. Mavis cried for twenty minutes straight and then made them teach her to play the trumpet.”
“Did she actually learn?”
“Oh Lord, no. She was as tone deaf as a post, but she had fun trying.”
By the time I left that night, I felt something I hadn’t in years, maybe ever.
I felt like I belonged somewhere.
* * *
Now it is Tuesday night, and The Rusty Spur is hosting what the hand-painted sign outside calls the “Two-Step Tuesday - Line Dancing for Everyone.”
The “everyone” part is apparently literal because the bar is packed with people of all ages - teenagers awkwardly shuffling around next to their grandparents, couples holding hands, groups of friends laughing at their own mistakes.
The band is a three-piece outfit playing country songs I do not recognize, but everyone here seems to know by heart.
I am the epitome of “fish out of water”.
I’m perched on my usual stool at the end of the bar, nursing a glass of boxed Chardonnay I have reluctantly come to accept as my signature drink, while watching the chaos happen on the dance floor.
I’ve officially turned into Norm from that old TV show, “Cheers.” I have my own stool, and I fully expect people to start yelling “Eleanor!” when I walk into the bar the next time.
“You should try it.”
I turn to see Presley beside me, her auburn hair loose tonight instead of in its usual braid.
“Try what?”
“Line dancing. It’s fun!”
“Oh, I don’t know the steps.”
“Nobody knows the steps at first. That’s the whole point. You learn as you go.”
“My feet hurt.”
“You liar!” She grabs my hand and tugs me off the stool.“Come on. I’ll teach you.”
“Presley, I really do not think—”
“Listen, you’ve been sitting on that stool for two weeks watching everybody else have fun.
I can literally see the imprint of your butt cheeks on the fake leather.
Mavis would be horrified.” She is still pulling me toward the dance floor.
“Besides, you’re supposed to be learning to be a real person, right?
Real people dance badly and then laugh about it. ”
I want to protest that I can dance. I took ballroom dance lessons for years. I can waltz and foxtrot with the best of them. Maybe even salsa if my life depended on it and there was enough good wine involved. But something tells me that particular skill set won’t help me here.
Before I can formulate a proper objection, I am standing at the edge of the dance floor, surrounded by people in cowboy boots and jeans, feeling spectacularly out of place in my slacks and silk blouse.
“Okay,” Presley says, standing beside me. “This one is easy. It is called the electric slide. Surely you’ve heard of it and danced this at weddings. If not, just follow along.”
I want to tell her that people in my neck of the woods don’t do the electric slide at weddings. My mother would’ve had a heart attack and died right in front of me just to avoid something like that.
The music shifts to something with a driving beat, and suddenly everybody around me is moving in unison, stepping to the right, stepping to the left, forward, backward, in a pattern that looks simple but is absolutely not simple when you are trying to do it for the first time.
I step where I am not supposed to step. I go left when I should go right.
I turn the wrong direction and almost collide with a woman who is at least seventy and executing all these moves with the precision of a drill sergeant.
I lose the rhythm entirely and stand frozen while everybody grapevines right on past me.
“You know, you’re thinking too hard,” Presley calls over the music. “Stop counting and just feel it.”
I try to feel it. I fail to feel it. All I feel is out of place.
I step on someone’s foot, a man who laughs good-naturedly, and then consider fleeing back to my stool and planting my butt cheeks right into their allotted slots.
But then something strange happens.
The woman I nearly collided with, that seventy-year-old drill sergeant, takes my hand and physically guides me through the next sequence.
“Step, step, step, turn,” she says, her voice cutting through the music. “There you go! Now again.”
I do it again and again. And somewhere around the fourth repetition, it finally clicks.
I am not good. I would not even say I am competent. But I am moving, and my feet are in a pattern that is starting to feel almost natural, while my body is responding to the music in a way that has nothing to do with the careful, controlled movements of ballroom dancing.
And I’m laughing.
I do not even know when it started. Somewhere between the third wrong turn and the fifth stepped-on foot. But I’m laughing, like really laughing, the kind that comes from somewhere deep in your chest and doesn’t care who is watching.
When the song ends, I’m breathless. My hair is coming loose, and my silk blouse is probably ruined by sweat, but I feel amazing.
“See?” Presley is grinning at me. “That wasn’t so bad.”
“That was terrible. I was terrible.”
“You were having fun, though. That is the whole point.”
The band launches into another song, something even faster and more complicated, and Presley is pulled away by a young man who has clearly been waiting for his chance.
So I start to retreat to my stool, but the drill sergeant woman grabs my arm.
“Oh no, you don’t. You’re staying for the boot scootin’ boogie. It is a classic.”
“I don’t know—”
“You didn’t know the electric slide either. Look at how that turned out.”
She has a point. A terrifying point, but a point nonetheless.
The boot scootin’ boogie is definitely harder than the electric slide.
There are kicks involved, and this heel movement, and something called a scoot that I cannot, for the life of me, execute correctly.
I look like a marionette being operated by somebody who has never seen a human being move before.
But this drill sergeant, whose name I learn between songs is Betty, and who taught high school gym for thirty-five years, refuses to let me give up. She corrects my posture, adjusts my arm position, and at one point actually physically moves my hips in the right direction.
“You’ve got good bones,” she tells me. “Good foundation. You just need to loosen up.”
“Yeah, well, I have never been very good at loosening up.”
“I can tell. But you’re getting there.”
By the third song, I’ve stopped caring how I look. I am sweating, my hair is a disaster, and I think I have developed a blister on my left heel, but I am also smiling. Genuinely smiling.
And that is when I notice Wyatt watching me.