gone. For a moment, he almost envied the other man, being able to cherish what he had, to say goodbye. Losing Jeannie so suddenly had been like being shoved off a cliff into an ice-cold waterhole—there was no time to get your breath before you had all you could handle just to keep from drowning. But as hard as Jeannie’s unexpected death had been on him and the kids, at least she hadn’t suffered. Watching somebody you loved dwindle away…he could only imagine how hard that must have been. “Too many memories in the house?” he finally said, as his own echoed softly from every nook and cranny of the one they were sitting in.
“That’s what I figured, but he never really said.”
“I’m done,” Trav piped up. “C’n I be ’scused?”
Sam said, “Sure,” and the kid slid down from his seat, his feet hitting the floor with a thump before pounding out the back door, Radar—having recovered from the cat’s brutal attack—hot on his heels. The screen door whined shut, leaving him and Carly alone. Together. With the water still humming through the pipes and Sam well aware that voicing Lane’s probable motivation for selling his house could possibly let Carly more into his own head than he might like, especially since a few of those memories now whistled through his brain like wind through a canyon. With some difficulty, Sam swallowed the bite in his mouth and said, “Your dad must be bored out of his mind. In an apartment, I mean.”
She gave him one of those looks that women do when they’re trying to translate what you just said into their own language, then nodded.
“You have no idea,” she was saying, taking another bite of lettuce, her posture bringing to mind the deceptive strength of a sapling.
“So you decided what he needed was a road trip to jump-start him again.”
“Both of us, actually. Although when I brought it up, Dad definitely pounced on the idea.”
“How long’ve you been on the road?”
“About a month.”
“Since you lost your job?”
“That happened about three months ago, actually. Which is when the sports doctor told me I could have surgery, with no guarantee I’d ever dance again anyway, or quit dancing altogether and the problem might clear up on its own.”
“Some choice.”
“Yeah. That’s what I thought.”
Her bravado wasn’t doing a particularly hot job of masking her disappointment. “And how long until you go back home?”
“We hadn’t decided that. One of the perks of being in limbo,” she said with a grand wave of her fork. “I’ve got a half offer from an old dance school friend who’s married with munchkins and the minivan and the whole nine yards in a Chicago suburb, she wants to open a dance school and wondered if I’d be interested in teaching.”
“Are you?”
That bite of lettuce finally found its way into her mouth. After several seconds of chewing, she shrugged. “It’s an option.”
The pipes groaned again, this time from the water being turned off. “But…not one you’re very excited about.”
“Hey. I’m thirty-seven. Even without my knee sabotaging me, I only had maybe five good years left, anyway. Eight if I didn’t mind pity applause,” she said with a short, dry laugh. “Still. Somehow, even though most dancers turn to teaching after they retire, I somehow never saw myself doing the Dolly Dinkle Dance School routine. Teaching a class full of everybody’s precious darlings in pink leotards and tutus… I can’t see it, frankly. I’m not really into kids.”
Sam thought of her wiping Travis’s chin and smiled to himself. “Yeah. I can tell.”
“It’s not that I don’t like them,” she added quickly. “Exactly. I just never quite know what to say to them. How to relate to them. I mean, my biological clock’s merrily ticking away and I’m like, ‘Fine, whatever.’ Shoot, it’s all I can do to take care of myself.”
Chuckling, Sam polished off his last sandwich, then chased it with the rest of his iced tea. When he finished, he leaned back in his chair. “You always this up-front with people?”
She shrugged. “Pretty much. Does it bother you?”
“It’s a mite unnerving, but no. Not particularly. Actually it’s kinda nice to be around someone who has no trouble saying whatever’s on her mind.”
“Most men wouldn’t agree with you.”
“That’s their problem,” he said mildly. “So tell me about your dancing.”
Brows lifted. “This isn’t a date. You’re not going to win any points by pretending to really be interested in what I do.”
“Humor me. It’s not every day I have an honest to God ballerina sitting in my kitchen. And I’d add ‘eating my food’ but that would be stretching it.”
Her eyes followed his to her plate. “Ah,” she said, with an understanding smirk, before her shoulders bounced again. “I’m not anorexic, if that’s what you’re thinking. I ate like a pig at breakfast, that’s all.”
“What? A piece of toast and a grapefruit half?”
“Hah. Three pieces of French toast, sausage and two scrambled eggs.”
“I’m impressed.”
“So was what’s-her-name. The woman who runs the place?”
“That would be Ruby.”
“Ruby, right. She wanted to know where I’d put it. Anyway…you sure you want to hear this? Okay, okay,” she said when he let out an annoyed sigh. “Not sure how much there is to say, really. I’ve been dancing literally since I could walk, even though I didn’t start formal training until I was ten and Dad retired, so we weren’t moving every five minutes. I went to dance camp as a teenager, then on to North Carolina School of the Arts for high school. After I graduated, I danced with a major New York company for a couple of years, which for anybody else would have been a total dream job. Except I realized that staying there would have meant basically dancing in the chorus of Swan Lake for the rest of my career. So I decided I’d have more opportunity in a smaller regional company, even if it meant a cut in pay. Never expected to end up back in Cincinnati, but there you are.”
On the surface, her words seemed straightforward enough. And yet, something about the way she wouldn’t look at him, the fingers of her left hand constantly worrying the edge of the plastic placement the whole time she was talking, led Sam to wonder if that part of her life had really been as straightforward as she was making out.
He took another bite of his sandwich before saying, “You ever regret your decision? To leave the bigger company?”
“No,” she said immediately. “See, dancing isn’t something I do, it’s who I am. Not that I expect anyone else to understand that. I mean, how much sense does it make to be so passionate about something that pays squat, that leaves you in virtually constant pain, and offers zip job security?”
“Sounds an awful lot like farming.”
She
