7. The Library Dance
THE LIbrARY DANCE
ESTRELLA
Ihad not expected to dance tonight.
The Thursday conversation club ran long, Susan extending the session to accommodate a spirited debate between Hiroshi and a retired professor from Buenos Aires about whether sports metaphors were the most efficient vehicle for learning English idioms. Leo had argued passionately on the side of sports, of course, while I had gently suggested that perhaps the language of the heart was more universally understood.
He’d looked at me then, those hazel eyes warm behind his glasses, and said, “Then consider this a lesson in both.”
I had tried very hard not to read too much into that.
It was only as we filed out of Room 3B into the cool evening air that we discovered what had transformed the usually quiet library lawn.
String lights had been woven through the old jacaranda trees that bordered the courtyard, casting the space in gold.
A small ensemble of a guitar, bass, and a violinist who looked barely old enough to drive was playing something slow and tender, the notes drifting upward toward a sky just beginning to darken from lavender to ink.
“What is this?” I breathed.
“Cultural heritage evening,” said the librarian I’d come to think of as our winking accomplice. She gestured toward a handmade banner: LA NOCHE DE LAS CULTURAS. “Third Thursday of every month. Tonight is Latin American music.”
The courtyard had filled with library patrons, couples and families sitting on low benches or swaying gently near the edge of a small cleared space that served as a dance floor.
Luz and Pedro, released from their craft session, appeared at my side.
Luz wore a crown of paper flowers she’d made herself, Pedro brandished a small tambourine.
“Mami, they’re playing music!” Luz’s eyes were enormous with delight.
“I hear it, mi amor.”
“Can we dance?”
Before I could answer, Pedro had already shuffled off toward the music, tambourine rattling in approximate time, utterly uninhibited. Luz chased after him, her paper flowers bouncing.
Leo appeared at my elbow. “I believe your children have voted.”
“They tend to do that,” I said, watching them with helpless affection. “It saves time.”
He laughed softly. The musicians shifted into something I recognized, a bolero, slow and aching, the kind of music designed to close the space between people.
Around us, couples drifted together. Even Susan from the conversation club was being spun gently by her husband, her face flushed with pleasure.
“I should probably keep an eye on the tambourine situation,” I said, more to fill the silence than anything else.
“Probably,” Leo agreed. He didn’t move. Neither did I.
“Leo.” I turned to look at him. He was already looking at me.
“Estrella.” He said my name the way he always did, each syllable given its proper weight, the R soft and true. “Would you dance with me?”
My heart performed something completely unprofessional. “I don’t know if—“
“One dance,” he said. “That’s all. And then I’ll go help Pedro shake that tambourine like a pro.”
I looked at my children. Luz had appointed herself Pedro’s dance instructor and was guiding his small hands in what appeared to be an extremely interpretive rumba. They were fine. They were more than fine, they were delighted.
“One dance,” I agreed.
He took my hand with the practiced ease of someone who had danced before, though I suspected his experience was more victory celebrations than ballrooms. His other hand settled at my waist, gentle and certain, and we found the rhythm of the bolero together with an ease that surprised me.
This close, I could smell his cologne, something warm and woody, and beneath it, something more honest. Just him.
The library lights caught the planes of his face, the small scar above his right eyebrow I’d never had a chance to ask about, the way the corners of his eyes creased when he looked down at me.
“You’re good at this,” I said.
“My grandmother taught me. She said a man who can’t dance is a man with no music in his soul.” He smiled. “She was a very dramatic woman.”
“I like her already.”
“She would have liked you. She had very strong opinions about passion and about people who weren’t afraid to feel things.”
I thought about that. I had spent the last two years trying not to feel things, trying to fold myself into something smaller, more manageable, easier to transport across borders and into a new life.
And here was this man, turning slowly beneath string lights on a library lawn, telling me that the thing I’d been trying to suppress was precisely what made me worth knowing.
“Leo,” I said quietly. “What are we doing?”
He looked down at me, his expression open and honest in that way I still wasn’t entirely used to. “Dancing,” he said. “And possibly falling in love. But I’m trying to be subtle about the second part.”
A breath left me that I hadn’t known I’d been holding.
“You are not particularly subtle,” I informed him.
“I know.” He didn’t look sorry about it. “Is that terrible?”
I thought about my first husband, who had been so subtle I’d had no idea about the starlet until she posted a photo. I thought about my second husband, who had been so smooth that I’d believed every word until the morning I walked through a door I wasn’t supposed to.
“No,” I said. “It’s... actually, it’s quite a relief.”
The bolero softened into its final bars, slow and intimate, and Leo drew me gently closer. Not presumptuous, not demanding, just an invitation I could decline. I didn’t decline.
“Mami,” Luz’s voice floated toward us from a few feet away. I turned to find her watching us with the expression of a small scientist completing a long-awaited experiment. “Are you in love?”
“Luz—” I blurted her name, but mostly because I didn’t want to say no.
“Pedro says you’re in love,” she reported. “Pedro, tell her what you said.”
Pedro considered this responsibility gravely. “I said they look like the cartoon prince and princess.”
“In the movie,” Luz clarified. “When they dance and the whole ballroom goes sparkly.”
Leo made a sound that was heroically not a laugh. I buried my face briefly against his shoulder, which was not at all helpful to my composure.
“We are dancing,” I said carefully, lifting my head. “Grown-up friends sometimes dance.”
“Can Leo be our friend who comes to the beach?” Pedro asked. This had clearly been a topic of some deliberation.
“We’re going to the beach on Sunday,” I told Leo, slightly helplessly.
“I know,” he said. “Your children invited me.”
“We did,” Luz confirmed. “Because we decided.” She examined Leo with great seriousness. “You can be Mami’s friend who we like. If you want.”
“I very much want,” Leo said solemnly.
Luz nodded, apparently satisfied with this formal arrangement. Then she grabbed Pedro’s hand. “Come on, we’re going to do the fast dance now.” And they were gone, careening toward the musicians with joyful abandon.
Leo and I stood in the settling quiet of their wake. Around us the music had shifted to something brighter, but neither of us moved.
“I apologize for my children,” I said. “They have no sense of... subtlety.”
“I don’t want subtlety from them,” he said. “I want exactly what they gave me just now.” He looked toward where Luz was attempting to teach Pedro something that bore no resemblance to any known dance form. “Permission.”
My heart made that undignified movement again. Harder this time.
“Leo.” My voice came out softer than I intended.
“Estrella.” Same.
He lifted my hand to his lips—a gesture that should have been theatrical, should have felt like something from one of my own telenovelas. Instead it felt like a promise. Not grand, not excessive. Just true.
“One more dance?” he asked against my fingers.
The music swelled. The lights glittered in the old jacaranda trees. My children were somewhere behind me, laughing.
“One more dance,” I agreed. And when his arms came around me again and we found our rhythm on that unlikely dance floor, I thought, this is what happy feels like. I had nearly forgotten.