Pretending to Dance

  “Chris Turner.” Chris dropped his hand to his side.

  Russell had come out the front door and now walked over to the carport, van keys jingling in his hand.

  “Bryan here is going to give us a jump, Doc,” he said to my father. He only called Daddy “Doc” or “Doctor” when he wanted someone to show my father some respect. It always worked.

  “Excellent,” Daddy said.

  Russell headed for the van and my father returned his attention to Chris.

  “You go to Owen High, Chris?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Rising senior, I’d guess?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I know the counselors over there,” Daddy said. “The principal and assistant principal, too. Very well. They’re a great group.”

  Those few words had the effect of draining the color from Chris’s face.

  “Is that right?” he said, but it wasn’t really a question.

  “Uh-huh,” Daddy said, and I knew the language he and Chris were speaking went a lot deeper than the words. I wondered what the counselors and principals at Owen High School would have to say about Chris that was making him squirm.

  “Give me a hand here, Chris,” Bryan said, and I saw the relief in Chris’s face as he excused himself to help Bryan and Russell with the jumper cables.

  * * *

  Once he’d gotten the van started, Russell turned on the air-conditioning to cool it down, then started pushing my father toward the ramp with me at his side. Chris looked awkward as he stood nearby, his hands in his pockets, and I avoided his eyes.

  “Thanks for the jump,” Russell said to Bryan, who gave him a wave.

  “Hold on a second, Russ,” Daddy said, when we were nearly to the ramp. He looked at Chris. “She’s fourteen, Chris,” he said. “Remember being fourteen?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What did you want when you were fourteen?” Daddy asked.

  “Daddy,” I pleaded, embarrassed. I wanted us to get in the van and drive away, not prolong the agony of this encounter any longer.

  “I know I was old enough to choose my own friends,” Chris said, and Daddy shot him a look.

  “Watch it, son,” he said, and Chris seemed to shrink back a little.

  Daddy nodded toward the ramp and Russell pushed him into the van. I looked at Chris. I wasn’t sure if my expression conveyed the apology I was hoping for or not, but he smiled at me in a way that told me my father’s intimidation wasn’t going to put an end to whatever it was we’d started.

  * * *

  I couldn’t remember another time when I’d felt nervous around my father. In the van on the way back to Morrison Ridge, my insides were tied in a knot and the silence was so thick it was hard to breathe. I wished he’d say something. I wished he’d yell at me and get it over with—my mother certainly would have—but that had never been his style. I stared out the side window of the passenger seat, my head turned away from Russell, my cheeks hot, wondering who was going to break the silence. I knew it wouldn’t be me.

  Ten minutes passed before Daddy finally spoke.

  “So, Moll,” he said from behind me, “if you had today to do over again, tell me what it would look like.”

  God. Couldn’t he lecture me like a normal parent?

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Yes you do.”

  I hesitated. “I would have told Stacy not to ask those guys over,” I said.

  “Oh bullshit,” my father said.

  I stared out the passenger side window at the mountains in the distance. “I don’t know what you want me to say,” I said finally.

  “Don’t give me the answer you think I want,” he said. “I really want to know how you would have liked today to be different.”

  I thought about it. About how sweet Chris had been to me. How he didn’t try anything more than a few kisses. And how much I’d liked those kisses.

  “The truth?” I asked.

  “Of course.”

  “I wish you and Russell hadn’t come early and the van hadn’t broken down.”

  Daddy laughed. It was a big belly laugh and I smiled cautiously. I glanced at Russell whose expression never changed as he stared at the road ahead of him.

  “I love your honesty, Moll,” Daddy said. “Next time you go to Stacy’s, though, Mom or I will talk to her mother to be sure an adult is going to be there.”

  “Okay,” I said. I knew I was getting off easy, and with the relief came the memory of Chris lying next to me on the sofa, his lips against mine, his tongue slipping into my mouth.

  I couldn’t wait to see him again.

  25

  San Diego

  Two weeks have passed since that phone call with Sienna and I must think of her a dozen times a day. Is she relieved at her decision to keep her baby? I hope it’s the right choice for her. I barely know her—well, I don’t know her at all, actually—and yet I’m worried about her.

  “I wish I could talk to her,” I tell Aidan over breakfast one morning.

  He looks surprised. “You’ll get us kicked off the waiting list,” he says. “You know you can’t try to change her mind.”

  “No, that’s not what I want to do.” I move the blueberries around in my yogurt with my spoon. My appetite has been almost nonexistent ever since Zoe told us Sienna changed her mind. “I just want to let her know we’re not angry or hurt or anything like that,” I say. “I don’t like the idea that she might feel guilty about the way she handled things.”

  Aidan slices a banana onto his granola. “You’re making too much out of it,” he says, setting down the knife. He gives me an indulgent smile. “You had one phone call with her and she thought she was talking to a different woman for half of it,” he says.

  I have to smile myself. He’s right. I’m going overboard.

  “She’s forgotten all about you,” Aidan continues, “so why are you still thinking about her?” He lifts a spoonful of granola to his mouth. “There will be another baby,” he says, before touching the cereal with his lips. “This one wasn’t meant to be ours.”

  I remember that Sienna has a mother and a younger brother and a bunch of friends at school who are all in the same boat. “I hope she has a lot of support, that’s all,” I say.

  “She’s not our problem.” He sips his coffee. “Let it go.”

  I hold up my hands in surrender. “Okay.” I say. He’s right. I spoke with Sienna for all of ten awkward minutes. Why am I so worried about her?

  * * *

  I have half an hour before I need to get to the office, so I pour my second cup of coffee and carry it to my desk to check my e-mail. I scan the list of messages until I reach DanielleK422. I stare at the address for a moment before clicking on it.

  Amalia’s back in the hospital. My mother heard about it through the grapevine. I guess she’s pretty sick. It’s some infection she picked up after one of those surgeries for her broken leg, and they haven’t been able to get rid of it. Just passing that info along in case you’re interested. xoxo Dani

  I read her e-mail twice. I’m truly sorry Amalia’s going through this. I try to picture her in a hospital bed as she fights to get well, but her face is blurry in my imagination. I bring up Google images on my screen and type in her name. I’ve done this before—searched for pictures of Amalia, and have never had any success in finding an image. Why there would be a photograph of her on the Internet, I can’t imagine, and yet I can’t stop myself from looking. An array of images fills my screen and I hunt through them searching for her. This time, I find her, although I have to enlarge the photo to be sure it’s her. I barely recognize her. She’s only about sixty years old but her hair, still long and thick, is as white as cotton. Her body is slender and she wears a flowy purple top. Her hair may be different but her sense of style hasn’t changed. She’s smiling, standing next to a painting on an easel, and when I click on the page, I see that her picture is from an article about a painting class she taught i
n Asheville.

  I’m going to be late for my first appointment this morning but I don’t care. I can’t tear my gaze away from Amalia’s face.

  There have been months … maybe even years … when I haven’t thought once about Amalia. What happened wasn’t her fault, though I’ve never been able to forgive her for her response to it. I know she’s tried to get in touch with me through Dani over the years, the same way Nora has, and I know that my cousin has kept my whereabouts to herself. I owe her for that. I was finished with Morrison Ridge long ago.

  And yet, I stare at Amalia’s picture. I touch my own face. My cheeks. My lips. I feel for some resemblance, but I know there is little. I have always been my father’s daughter. Yet there’s no denying that the woman on the screen is my birth mother.

  I will call her.

  Not now, though, I think, as I shut down my computer. I will call her. Just not today.

  26

  Morrison Ridge

  I rode my bike into the clearing in front of Amalia’s house the day after I was with Chris at Stacy’s house and found her loading her basket of cleaning supplies into the back of her car. We’d moved my dance lesson to Tuesday this week—today—because she had something else she needed to do on Wednesday, but she was in her shorts and T-shirt instead of her dance clothes and she looked surprised when she saw me.

  “Oh, Molly!” she said. “Oh my God, baby, I completely forgot we moved our lesson to today! It’s my day to clean Claudia and Jim’s house.”

  I straddled my bike next to the tree stump shaped like a chair. A dragonfly lit on the rim of my bike basket, wings fluttering. “Oh,” I said, disappointed. I wanted time with her. Time away from my house. At home, I felt like everyone was staring at me when I walked in a room, upset with me over what had happened at Stacy’s yesterday. Daddy, Russell, my mother. I felt all their eyes on me. Yet I had the feeling neither Daddy nor Russell had said anything to my mother. Surely she would have said something to me about it if they had.

  I was obsessed. In the less than twenty-four hours since I’d met Chris, he’d become all I could think about. I felt the gazes of the New Kids and Johnny Depp following me around the springhouse, silently chiding me for leaving them behind. In my room the night before, I literally jumped each time the phone rang, hoping it was Chris or, at the very least, Stacy, but no one called me all evening and when I tried to reach Stacy around ten o’clock, there was no answer. I needed to talk to her to find out what had happened after I left. I worried my father’s attempt to scare Chris off had worked.

  “Do you want to come with me?” Amalia asked now. “It’s not much fun, but we could chat while I clean.”

  “I could help you,” I said, getting off my bike and leaning it against the tree stump.

  “Hop in,” she said, and I got into the passenger seat and directed the vent for the air conditioner toward my face.

  “So,” Amalia said as she turned onto the loop road through Morrison Ridge. “I believe I have you to thank for an invitation to the midsummer party.”

  “Oh good!” I said. “Did Nanny leave you a note?”

  “She called,” Amalia said. “Chilly, as usual, but she said she couldn’t deny you anything.” She turned to smile at me. “Thank you.” She reached over to smooth the back of her warm fingers down my cheek. “I truly do want to be there. Morrison Ridge has been my home for a long time, too.”

  I felt angry. “I don’t think it’s fair how people treat you here,” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter.” She shrugged. “I get to be close to you and that’s what counts.”

  “But you didn’t do anything more wrong than what Daddy did,” I said. She was quiet and I thought she was going to change the subject again the way she had during our dance lesson the week before, so I kept talking before she had the chance. “I never really knew about you showing up with me the way you did,” I said. “I didn’t know if you were married to Daddy when I was born or what.”

  She smiled. “You never asked, and we decided we’d wait until you did rather than dump a lot of information on you before you were ready to hear it.”

  We drove past Nanny’s house and in a moment I could see the zip line platform poking out of the trees. Our rides on the zip line seemed like months ago rather than a few days. I had to come up with another adventure that would be fun for my father. One that wasn’t quite so labor intensive. I worried the whole fiasco the day before—the problems with the van and the problems with me—had undone any positive feelings sailing through the air might have given him.

  I turned back to Amalia after we passed the zip line. “Did you ever think of keeping me?” I asked.

  She hesitated. “I’m not good mother material, Molly,” she said finally.

  I felt a little stab in my chest. There were plenty of women who were crappy mother material, but they still mothered. Had she been thrilled she could give me away? Somehow, her forgetting about our dance lesson seemed to fit with her turning me over to my father. It must have been a relief to her to be able to do that.

  I felt her glance at me. “I loved you so much,” she assured me. “But I thought it was best for you to be with your father and Nora rather than with a single mother … and a flaky single mother at that.” She shrugged. Smiled. “Nora rose to the occasion beautifully, didn’t she? She put your needs above everything else, which was what I’d hoped for. I’m sure it wasn’t easy for her to share her neighborhood with her husband’s former lover.”

  The word lover made me cringe. I didn’t want to imagine my father as anyone’s lover, yet lately it seemed I was being forced to think about it whether I wanted to or not.

  Amalia turned onto the road leading to Aunt Claudia and Uncle Jim’s house. “She’s not Miss Warmth, Nora, but she’s very practical, and when you came along, she embraced you as her own. You ended up with two wonderful parents, don’t you think?”

  I nodded. “I’m lucky I get to have all three of you,” I said, but that little niggling new hurt wasn’t going away any time soon.

  * * *

  Of the five houses on Morrison Ridge, Aunt Claudia and Uncle Jim’s looked the worst. I guessed it had been pretty when it was first built. It was two stories tall and a taupe color with black trim, but it was hard to really notice the house because of the three old cars and one old pickup in the clearing around it, plus the shrubbery was a mess, growing up one side of the house, and ivy nearly blocked the front steps with long green leafy tendrils.

  It had been a while since I’d been inside their house. I thought back. Dani had a big birthday party when she was thirteen and that must have been the last time. She’d still looked like a typical young girl back then, with hair the same boring brown as mine and skin bare of makeup. I would have been ten. All I remembered about that day was that Aunt Claudia told Dani to share her jewelry-making kit with me, and rather than let me play with it, Dani flushed the beads and strings down the toilet. I really couldn’t stand her. Mom once told me we’d like each other as we got older but I couldn’t picture that ever happening.

  As soon as Amalia and I walked inside the house, I remembered the smell. I’d never smelled anything like it anywhere else. It reminded me of the aroma of baking bread, warm and yeasty.

  “Jim’s beer,” Amalia said. “That smell is in every corner of this house.”

  “I think I like it,” I said, trying to decide. It was a good smell, but it had a strange, sour edge to it.

  “In small doses, I do, too,” she said, setting her cleaning basket on the kitchen table. “At least it covers up the smell of their cigarettes. By the time I’m done cleaning this house, though, all I can think about is taking a shower and washing that smell out of my hair.”

  “Sh,” I said, worried that someone might be home.

  “Oh, they’re not here.” Amalia reached into the cabinet beneath the sink and pulled out a bottle of dish detergent. “Jim’s out hauling trash and today is Claudia’s stitching circle, or something
like that, and I don’t remember what Dani’s doing, but something.”

  “Probably at the mall buying some more black clothes.”

  Amalia smiled. “Don’t be so rough on her,” she said, squeezing the detergent under running water in the sink. “Back when I showed up at Morrison Ridge with you, she had a harder time with it than anyone. With the exception of Nora, of course.”

  “Dani did? Why? She was just a little kid.”

  “Your father doted on her, that’s why,” Amalia said, holding her fingertips beneath the water as she adjusted the temperature. “She was the little princess and then you came along and sucked up all his attention. Have some compassion for her.”

  That surprised me, although when I thought about it, my father was always really nice to Dani. When someone in the family made fun of her makeup or how weird she’d become, he’d defend her, saying something about her “testing her wings.”

  Dani’s house, though, was undeniably filthy, at least judging from the kitchen and what I could see of the living room. My own house was always “picked up,” as Nora would say.

  “I can clean Bess’s—your grandmother’s—house or Trevor and Toni’s house in two hours.” Amalia turned off the faucet and dried her hands on a dish towel. “This house, a minimum of four. Toni straightens up before I get to their place, but Claudia … look at this mess. This is for me, trust me.”

  “What do you mean, it’s for you?”

  “Claudia adored Nora, so when I showed up … well, she was against me living at Morrison Ridge. She thought I’d be a home wrecker.” She smiled. “I’d never do that to Nora.” She pulled out one of the chairs at the kitchen table. “Why don’t you sit here and keep me company while I work?” she asked.

  “Want me to clean one of the other rooms?” I offered.

  “Oh, you don’t have to help, Molly. If they paid me something, that would be one thing and I could split it with you, but since they don’t, I don’t think you should help. You can put on the radio and dance, or just chat with me.”