12. Luisa
— ? —
Luisa
“Your leg was floppy.”
I stopped mid-pirouette and stared at my daughter.
Poppy was perched on the counter at Birdie’s, eating her way through a stack of French toast nearly half her body weight.
She had maple syrup on her chin, her hair was escaping from the braids I’d spent twenty minutes perfecting this morning, and she was looking at me with the calm certainty of a tiny dance critic who had never doubted herself in her entire three-and-a-half years of life.
“My leg was not floppy.”
“It was.” She nodded seriously. “A little bit floppy. Like a noodle.”
“My leg is never like a noodle.”
“Gus.” Poppy turned to the gruff man hunched over his coffee at the end of the counter. “Was Mama’s leg floppy?”
Gus looked up from his newspaper. His face, as always, suggested that the concept of human emotion was a fate reserved for other people. But I saw his mouth twitch.
“Little bit,” he said.
“Traitor.”
“I call ‘em like I see ‘em.”
Birdie appeared from the kitchen, coffeepot in hand, moving through the breakfast rush like a general commanding troops. “Stop harassing my customers, Lu. And Poppy, don’t talk with your mouth full.”
“I’m not harassing anyone. I’m performing. For tips.” I gestured to the empty tip jar on the counter. “Which, by the way, is pathetic. Bellhaven has no appreciation for the arts.”
“Bellhaven has seen your pirouette six hundred times,” Birdie said. “We’re over it.”
“Rude.”
“True.”
I slid onto the stool next to Poppy and stole a bite of her French toast. She slapped my hand away with the outrage of someone defending sacred territory.
“Mama! Those are mine.”
“You have six of them.”
“And I’m going to eat all six.”
“You’re three feet tall. Where does it even go?”
“I’m almost four.” She held up four fingers, then frowned and adjusted to three and a half. “And it goes in my stomach, which is very big.”
“Your stomach is the size of a tangerine.”
“A big tangerine.”
Birdie poured me coffee without asking, she’d stopped asking years ago, and I wrapped my hands around the mug, letting the warmth seep into my fingers.
Outside, November was doing its best impression of a postcard: gray sky, gray water, boats bobbing in the harbor, the first hints of snow dusting the distant hills.
Four years.
Some days it felt like I’d just stepped off that bus, green and terrified and running from a life that had shattered around me. Other days the woman I’d been in Boston felt like someone I’d only read about in a book.
“Mama.” Poppy tugged at my sleeve. “Is today book club?”
“Tomorrow’s book club.”
“What are you reading?”
“Something inappropriate.”
“What does inappropriate mean?”
“It means you can’t read it until you’re forty.”
Poppy frowned. “That’s a long time.”
“That’s the point.”
At the corner booth, three women were huddled over pie and stage whispers. The Bellhaven Book Club, technically called the “Literary Society,” though nobody had read anything literary in years, was in full strategic mode.
“We should do that new one,” Agnes was saying. “The one with the duke.”
“We did a duke last month,” Doris countered. “I want a pirate.”
“What about the Scottish one?” Fern leaned in. “I heard it’s very detailed.”
“Detailed how?”
“You know.” Fern waggled her eyebrows. “Detailed.”
“Sold.”
I grinned into my coffee. The book club had adopted me in my second month in Bellhaven, about thirty seconds after Agnes discovered I could read faster than anyone in town. My official role was “research consultant,” which meant I previewed the spicier options and provided content warnings.
The warnings were mostly ignored.
“Lu!” Agnes waved me over. “Tell them about the Scottish book.”
“Which Scottish book? You’ve read seven this year.”
“The new one. With the kilts.”
“And the castle,” Doris added.
“And the thing with the-” Fern made a gesture I chose not to interpret.
“I haven’t read that one yet.”
“Well, read faster. We need answers.”
Poppy had finished her French toast and was now conducting a detailed conversation with the coffeemaker.
“Good morning, Grumpy,” she said, patting its side. “Are you feeling better today? Birdie says you’ve been making weird noises.”
The coffeemaker, predictably, did not respond.
“That’s okay,” Poppy continued. “Sometimes I make weird noises too. Mama says it’s because I’m growing.”
“Poppy.” I reached for her. “Stop talking to the appliances.”
“Grumpy isn’t an appliance. Grumpy is a friend.”
This was my life now. My daughter named everything. The coffeemaker was Grumpy. Gus’s forklift was Big Yellow. The ancient bus that still ran the route from Portland was “our bus,” and she corrected anyone who tried to call it anything else.
That’s the bus that brought us home, she’d say, with the absolute conviction of a child who had never doubted anything in her life. It’s special.
She wasn’t wrong.
I looked at her now, maple syrup face, wild hair, her father’s light blue eyes that sometimes caught me off guard, and felt my heart do its familiar squeeze, the ache and flood of love for this tiny person who had saved me in ways she would never understand.
“Come on, monster.” I lifted her off the counter. “We’ve got class in thirty minutes.”
“Can I help?”
“You can sit quietly and not critique anyone’s technique.”
“But sometimes their technique is bad.”
“We don’t say that out loud,” I said, not looking up from the sign-in sheet.
“Why?”
“Because it’s rude.”
“But it’s true.” Gus’s face didn’t move an inch.
“True and rude can coexist. We just keep the true part in our heads.”
Poppy considered this.
“That seems complicated.”
“Welcome to society.”
Gus grunted from his stool. “Kid’s got a point.”
“Don’t encourage her.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
I paid for breakfast, Birdie tried to wave me off, I insisted, we did this dance every morning, and headed for the door, Poppy’s hand in mine.
The studio was three blocks away, above the hardware store.
It had taken six months to transform the empty room into a working studio: mirrors on one wall, a barre Gus had built himself, a sound system that occasionally worked.
I’d painted the walls myself, a soft sage green that Poppy had helped choose.
She’d named the studio too, of course.
The Dancing Place, she called it, and the name had stuck. I’d had a sign made. It hung above the door, slightly crooked, exactly perfect.
“Mrs. Halloway first today?” Poppy asked as we climbed the stairs.
“Mrs. Henderson. Her knee’s been acting up.”
“The clickety one.”
“Don’t call it that.”
“But it clicks.”
“Still don’t call it that.”
The morning class was gentle movement, stretching, basic ballet positions, the kind of slow careful work that helped bodies remember what they could do.
My students ranged from Agnes (who claimed to be eighty but everyone suspected was closer to ninety) to a handful of kids who needed to burn energy before school.
Poppy sat on her special stool in the corner, providing commentary.
“Point your toes more, Mrs. Henderson.”
“That’s as pointed as they go, sweetheart.”
“Oh.” Pause. “They’re very nice anyway.”
At ten, the kids class filtered in, and I taught them the opening moves of a routine we’d been building for weeks. Poppy joined this one, moving through the steps with the natural grace she’d inherited from me and the stubbornness she’d gotten from, well, me too, probably. I was very stubborn.
By noon, I was sweaty and tired and deeply satisfied.
“Good class.” Birdie appeared in the doorway with a paper bag. “Brought you lunch.”
“You didn’t have to-”
“Turkey sandwich. Extra pickles. Don’t argue.”
I didn’t argue.
We ate on the studio floor, Poppy between us, Birdie telling a story about a customer who’d tried to pay for breakfast in Bitcoin.
“I told him this is Bellhaven, not Silicon Valley. We take cash and cards. That’s it.”
“What did he do?”
“Looked at me like I’d personally killed his dreams. Then he found a twenty in his pocket.”
Poppy was lying on her back, staring at the ceiling.
“Mama?”
“Yeah, baby?”
“When’s my birthday?”
“June 5th. Same as always.”
“How many days?” She was hanging upside down off the bench now.
“A lot of days. It’s November.”
“That’s too many days,” she informed me, deeply betrayed by the calendar.
“Time moves at one speed, unfortunately.”
“I want to be four.”
“You’ll be four. Just gotta wait.”
She sighed dramatically. Three-going-on-four-year-olds had perfected the dramatic sigh.
The afternoon passed in the comfortable rhythm I’d built over four years. Another class. Some paperwork. A call from a mom asking about enrollment. Poppy’s nap on the studio couch, her small body curled under the blanket Fern had knitted for her.
I watched her sleep and thought about all the things she didn’t know.
She didn’t know that her father was a man I’d loved so much it had nearly destroyed me.
She didn’t know that I’d walked away from everything rather than let him know she existed.
She didn’t know that once a year, on a certain Saturday, I closed the studio and locked the door and let myself remember what I’d lost.
Nobody in Bellhaven knew who her father was. It was the one question they never asked, and Bellhaven considered asking to be a crime. They’d accepted me, accepted her, accepted the story without ever demanding the details.
I was grateful for that. More than I could say.
At five, we walked back to Birdie’s for dinner. The sky had gone full November, streaking orange and pink across the gray, the sun setting over the harbor like it was putting on a show.
Poppy skipped ahead, stopping to wave at every person she passed.
“Hi, Mr. Thompson!”
“Hi, Poppy.”
“Hi, Mrs. Delgado!”
“Hello, sweetheart.”
“Hi, Big Yellow!”
Gus’s forklift, parked outside the hardware store, did not respond. Gus himself, standing in the doorway, grunted.
“That means hi,” Poppy informed me seriously.
“I know, baby.”
The diner was warm and bright, the smell of coffee and pie wrapping around us like a hug. I was looking at the specials board, thinking about what Poppy might actually eat versus what she would claim she wanted, when I heard Birdie’s voice go sharp.
“Can I help you?”
I looked up.
Through the window, a black car was pulling up to the curb. Sleek. Expensive. The kind of car that didn’t exist in Bellhaven, where vehicles were practical things that got you from point A to point B and weren’t supposed to look like they cost more than a house.
The door opened.
Black wavy hair. Light blue eyes. A face I saw every day in my daughter’s smile.
Four years too late, Wade Buckley was standing in Bellhaven.