Rafe
Chapter thirteen
The team chat had thirty new messages, most of them Varga’s goal from eleven different camera angles, posted by Varga.
Max had sent me three more messages:
Max: also I’ve seen the guest list. we’ll discuss in the car on the way
Max: rest up. hydrate. this is our Stanley Cup
I scrambled eggs, made two slices of toast with peanut butter, and thought about the day while I ate.
Varga and I didn’t resolve my response to his invitation. I wasn’t used to that. Every time I said yes or sure, people accepted it.
I did my morning stretching routine and then drank a second cup of coffee, slower than the first. At nine, I stood in front of the closet, where everything hung in its spot, evenly spaced—practice clothes, travel clothes, and the two suits a salesperson had picked.
I took out jeans and a gray henley. Lastly, I pulled on boots with soft soles. I could move in them.
The Hungarian church was brick, with a white steeple and a reader board out front that said WINTER FUNDRAISER. Behind it sat a parish hall with a gravel lot, and the lot was already half full when I arrived. As I opened the truck’s door and stepped out, I heard accordion music.
Inside, a coat rack sagged under its load. A woman sat at a folding table with a cash box. She looked at me and then looked at a printed list before waving me past without asking my name.
The hall smelled of coffee, paprika, and onions.
Long tables ran down one side, covered with paper tablecloths.
A stage at the far end held a folk ensemble: an accordion, two violins, a bass, and an instrument with a hand-lettered card taped to it that read CIMBALOM.
It was the size of a kitchen table, with strings running over a body of honey-colored wood.
I caught myself wondering about the specific species of wood.
I knew someone who could answer that question, but he wasn’t there.
Dancers, mostly women, scattered across the middle of the floor. Varga stood off to the side with a group of men.
He held a coffee and gestured with it. While I watched, a woman about four foot ten approached him and then reached up to fix his collar without interrupting. He automatically crouched to make it easier.
Varga spotted me from across the hall.
He gave me the once-over, stopping briefly on my boots, and then tipped his head toward the kitchen pass-through. When I approached, he said, “Marta’s in the kitchen. She knows you’re coming.”
“No Rook?” I asked.
“Rook came to the spring fundraiser. This one’s mine. The spring one has the lamb roast. He shows up for the lamb and everyone tells him he’s too thin. He loves it. This is the real one. It has the dancing.”
I hung up my coat.
“Did you eat breakfast?”
“Scrambled eggs.”
Varga scrunched up his nose. “Okay. It doesn’t matter. Whatever you ate, you’re eating again at eleven.” He scanned the hall over my shoulder while he talked to me. “Ah, there she is. Stand up straight.”
“I am standing straight.”
“Straighter then. She notices the effort.”
A hand closed on my elbow.
“So you’re the boy,” Marta said.
She came up to the middle of my chest. She had steel-gray hair pinned back, a cardigan the color of oatmeal, and reading glasses on a chain.
“Rafe,” I said, and reached my hand out.
She took it, turned it over, and looked at my palm as if she were appraising it, and gave it back. “Lucas says you’re an athlete like he is.”
“I play hockey with him.”
“Then you know how to use your feet. Skating and dancing are almost the same. Come.”
“He just got here,” Varga said. “He hasn’t even—“
“He can hear the music standing still, or he can hear it moving. Which is better?” She didn’t wait for Varga’s answer. She still had my elbow, and she walked me toward the middle of the floor. I glanced back at Varga, and he shrugged with both hands raised.
Marta planted me at the edge of the dancers and pointed at the floor between us.
“Csárdás,” she said. “Don’t try to pronounce it, just listen to it. Two steps this way, two steps back. The music tells you when. Left foot first.”
I moved my right foot.
“Left,” she said.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, be left.” She pointed again, and I got the correct foot out. She nodded once and started counting. We went two steps one way and then two steps back. She caught my hands, placing one at her shoulder blade and one out to the side.
She looked down at my feet. “Steps are too big. You’re not going anywhere. Use small steps so everything stays under you.”
I made the steps smaller. It was easier.
“Now do it again, but don’t watch your feet. Your feet know where they are. They’ve been at the end of your legs your whole life.”
Every instruction Marta gave was exact. I didn’t need to figure out any other meaning. I only needed to do what she told me to do.
I relaxed. There was an accordion lead, the floor and a small strong hand steering me.
“Enough,” Marta said, and pointed at a folding chair by the wall. “Rest. Drink water. Then we go again.”
I grabbed a bottle from a table and drank. Five minutes later, Marta found me and pulled me back out to dance.
“You see?” she said. “You’ve got a body that listens.”
My ears flushed.
“Lucas doesn’t listen,” she said, tipping her head sideways.
Varga was three couples down, dancing with a woman in her seventies, and he was terrible. His partner corrected him, and then the woman in the next couple did. A woman watching him from the sidelines shook her head. He argued with one with a massive smile on his face.
“Nine years,” Marta said, “and he still leads with the wrong foot. On purpose, I think. If he did it right, nobody would talk to him.”
The band wound the tune down, and the accordion player made an announcement in Hungarian. Half the hall shouted back. It must have been a request. He nodded graciously and played a quiet interlude. Couples changed partners and caught their breath.
Marta let go of my hands.
“You’ll dance the slow one later. The slow one has a turn, and you’re not ready yet, but you will be by then.” She looked past my arm and raised one eyebrow.
“Go get coffee,” she said. “Do you know that one? Standing by the urn?”
I turned around and froze.
At the coffee urn, in a quarter-zip and khakis, holding a paper cup, was Pratt.
I crossed the hall, certain that at some distance the picture would resolve into a stranger who looked a lot like Pratt. It didn’t. The picture remained the same. It was Pratt, calmly watching the dancers and drinking coffee.
“Hey,” I said.
“Rafe.” There was no surprise in his voice.
“I didn’t know you were Hungarian.”
“I’m not, but who doesn’t love folk dancing?”
That was all he said. He took a sip of his coffee and went back to watching the floor. Nobody around me was paying attention to him. He was part of the community.
Varga came up to my opposite shoulder. “He comes every year. Nobody invited him the first time. He was just here, and now he’s like a load-bearing column.”
“Where’s Sully?” I asked Pratt.
“He works on Saturdays.”
The band took a break, and the stage stood empty except for the instruments. I walked closer to the stage to look at the cimbalom. Strings crossing over each other, almost like the inside of a piano, and the wood underneath them glowed.
I took my phone out and took a photo without thinking about it.
Then the food line opened, and Varga gestured for me to join it. I never got to the end. I was maybe four people back when a woman in an apron cut me out of it, walked me to a long table, and set a full plate in front of me.
It was a delicious chicken dish, and Varga explained later that it was paprikash served over dumplings. The woman patted my shoulder twice and left. Nobody had asked if I was hungry.
The dumplings were the best thing I’d eaten since Sunday at the Gregorys’.
“Nokedli,” Varga said when he sat down across from me with his own plate. “You’re about to hear about the nokedli. They are like sp?tzle, but twice as good. Wait for it.”
I didn’t have to wait long. A second woman stopped at my shoulder, looked at my plate, and said something in Hungarian that made the first woman, three tables away, turn all the way around.
“Ilona made the batch you’re eating,” Varga translated. “Kati made the other batch. Whatever happens next, keep eating.”
It sounded as if Kati had asked a question of Ilona. She fired back an answer without breaking stride, and two tables of people laughed. They looked at me.
“Very good,” I said, with my mouth half full, and both Ilona and Kati nodded.
I ate everything on the plate, and when Ilona came by and added a second helping without slowing down, I ate that too.
The musicians came back from their break. The floor began to fill.
Marta was watching me from the edge of the floor. She wasn’t standing, and she’d set up two folding chairs at the side. They were out of the traffic, and she was sitting in one of them with her hands folded in her lap. She patted the empty one beside her.
“Sit,” she said. “This one we don’t dance. This one we talk.”
The chairs were close enough to the stage that nobody else would hear what we said.
“My husband danced like Lucas,” she said. “Terrible. Forty-one years, and terrible the whole time. He danced like a man carrying furniture.” She turned to look at me. “But he never missed a dance.”
“What do you come for?”
“For this,” she said, gesturing and taking in the entire hall. “Now, look.”
She pulled her phone out, putting her glasses on halfway down her nose. She thumbed through photos with the screen tipped toward me. I assumed they were grandchildren.
“That one’s Danny. That one’s the oldest, Eva.
She studies at Loyola. That one”—it was a teenager in a hoodie, giving the camera a peace sign—“is Marko. He watches hockey, all of it. He knew who you were when I told him Lucas said you would come.” She swiped on.
“This one wants expensive earbuds for his birthday. I said he could have them if he shovels my walk until March.”
“That’s fair.”
“It’s better than fair; my walk is short.” She put the phone away and pulled the glasses off, letting them hang by the chain around her neck. The band played something slow, with one violin carrying the melody up high and sweet.
“So, next time you bring your boyfriend,” she said. “The one all over the internet who works on houses. Next time, bring him. Does he dance?”
“It’s not real.”
The sentence was out of my mouth before I understood the words. No preparation. Nothing.
“It’s for publicity; the team set it up. Max is a great guy, but—“
I finally stopped myself.
Nobody in the world outside the deal knew. I hadn’t told my mother or the team, and I’d just let it walk right out of my mouth in front of a stranger.
Marta nodded slowly.
“Ah,” she said. “For the TV.”
That was her entire reaction. She shrugged.
“It happens more than we think,” she said.
She continued to watch the dancers.
“And is there a real one?”
I felt my entire face flush, and I struggled to push no out of my mouth, but it didn’t come.
“Hm,” Marta said. She patted my knee once.
The song ended, and the crowd applauded.
I changed the subject. “What’s the slow dance called? The one with the turn.”
“Lassú,” Marta said as she stood. “Come. You’re ready now.”
It was past two when the dance ended. I made myself useful. I stacked chairs until three separate people told me to stop, and then I stacked a few more.
Varga walked me out through the gravel lot. “Marta says you can come back,” he said. “I want you to know she’s not being polite. She doesn’t do that. It took Rook two years to understand. He thought it was because he brought her flowers.”
Varga stopped at my truck and looked at me with his hands jammed in his pockets. “You danced the lassú on your first day. When we’re old, I’m going to lie and say I taught you.”
“You can say it now. I’ll back you.”
“This is why you’re my favorite.” He knocked twice on the truck’s hood and walked off toward his car, whistling one of the tunes the accordion played.
My apartment was quiet when I returned. The team chat was busy. Someone had found a video of a beaver walking through a Canadian hardware store, and Trier commented on its confidence. Heath said the beaver reminded him of Varga entering a room.
Every time my phone buzzed, I looked. There was nothing about what I told Marta. There was nothing from Niko either.