The Last Waltz Before They Rolled Up the Floor

Ruth brought a seam ripper to the last dance at the Delver Hall. There was a loose hem on one of the velvet curtains, and she couldn’t bear to leave it like that, even if the wrecking crew got there before anybody noticed her stitches.

The boy by the coat rack reached for the speaker cord. “You want this packed up?”

“No, honey. Leave that one on for five more minutes.”

His name was Elliot. He’d been taking lessons here since September and had learned to hold his shoulders down. Ruth had hemmed his first pair of dance pants. He kept thanking her for making him look taller, when all she’d done was let people see where his feet were.

Only a narrow strip of the portable oak floor still lay in the middle of the room. Volunteers had taken up the panels along the sides. The bar was bare except for a row of glasses with the upside-down stems in the air. Ruth had spent thirty-four years in this room and had never seen the streetlight from where she stood. Somebody had already taken down the curtains at the far windows.

June came through the side door in plum-colored trousers and the same black practice shoes she’d worn to their last competition. Ruth knew by the pale little repair at the left toe. She’d sewn it herself.

“I thought you were in Bellcross,” Ruth said. June said she had been that morning. Ruth could picture the drive, every stretch of highway where the radio went to static.

“That’s four hours.”

“Closer to five with the bridge.”

June stood on the strip of oak and eased the toe of one shoe back and forth across a seam in the floor. They used to check unfamiliar floors that way, before the judges came in. Ruth had forgotten how much she liked watching June do it.

Twenty years ago, on the night they’d won their last waltz, June had asked her to come across the street for pie. Ruth had said she was tired. June had moved to Bellcross that winter, and for years Ruth could still make herself angry at a perfectly ordinary piece of pie.

Elliot lifted his phone beside the speaker. “Do you want the one you used to compete to?”

June looked down at the floor, then up at Ruth. She held out a hand, palm up, with the fingers loose.

“Before the music starts,” June said, “ask me what I came here to say twenty years ago.”

Ruth put the seam ripper on the windowsill. “What did you come here to say twenty years ago?”

“That I was in love with you.”

June said it the way she used to announce a change in the steps. Quietly, in time for Ruth to do something about it. “The pie was supposed to give me a minute to get there.”

“I could’ve gone for pie.” June nodded.

“I told myself you’d ask me again.”

June lowered her hand. “I told myself you knew what I was asking.”

For a moment they could hear the rain hitting the metal box outside the side door. Ruth could have spent another twenty years building a case for the things she’d almost done. She had a good memory for almost.

“Elliot,” she said, “can we have something we don’t already know the steps to?” He held up three fingers and she nodded.

Ruth offered June her hand this time. June took it, then switched hands when she realized Ruth meant to lead. They stood beneath the windows with the streetlight coming in, one hand at shoulder height and the other at June’s back, and waited through a few bars while the music found its feet.

The old competition pattern would have taken them the length of the room. They had enough floor for three good steps before Ruth had to turn them. On the second turn she stepped on June’s shoe.

“Same toe,” June said.

Ruth glanced down. “I’m retired. You can’t bring that back for alterations.”

June laughed and lost the count, and for a whole bar they rocked on their heels without going anywhere. Ruth wished somebody had told them, all those years of getting up before daylight to practice, how much fun it could be to get a thing wrong.

When the song ended, Elliot let the room go quiet. June stayed on the floor while Ruth went to fetch the seam ripper. The loose hem was still there. Ruth tucked the little tool into the pocket of her cardigan.

“You driving back tonight?” she asked.

June shook her head. “I got a room. I didn’t know how this would go.”

“Are you free in the morning?”

June took a moment with that. “I’m free right now.”

The place across the street had been a hardware store for years. Ruth knew a diner by the bus depot that kept pies in a rotating case and served breakfast till midnight. She told June they could walk there in ten minutes, maybe twelve with the rain.

At the door June slipped the umbrella strap over her wrist. Ruth took her hand before she could open it, and they stepped out together.

They took twelve minutes.