Don’t Let Me Go(22)

She was standing in his kitchen — because there was no place to sit in his kitchen — leaning her back against the washer-dryer, and trying to pull Billy’s special tap shoes over three pairs of socks without bunching up the socks.

“You don’t still have to be sorry about that.”

“But look at your poor nails. They’re so sad.”

“No, don’t look at my poor nails,” Billy said, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his old bathrobe. It hurt, because all of his fingers were still sore.

“Why not look at them?”

“Because they’re sad.”

“I just feel like it’s my fault,” she said, getting the first shoe in place at long last.

“Look. Baby girl. It’s not your fault if I’m such a freak that I can’t handle a little mild tension.”

“Don’t call yourself that,” she said, frowning as if for the cameras. Dramatically. A girl after Billy’s own heart. “I don’t like that.”

“Besides,” he said. “It was an honest mistake. The past is the past. It’s gone, thank God.”

“I thought you liked your past.”

“Some of it, yes. Some of it, no.”

“But you have all those pictures around to remind you of it.”

She set her one shod foot down on Billy’s kitchen linoleum. The tapping sound drove clean through every one of Billy’s defenses and found a feeling place. A little like bumping into an ex-lover, suddenly and without warning, someone who’d hurt you beyond repair, but whom you still loved.

How much of his life had he devoted to that tiny, but absolutely singular, sound?

“I like to remember the good parts and forget the rest.”

“I don’t think that works,” Grace said.

“You don’t think what works?”

She tested the sound of her taps once, on purpose, doing a slow flap step, remembered from her first lesson. Then she set about to pull on the other shoe.

“It’s like people who want to feel only happy but not sad,” she said. “It never works. You either feel things or you don’t. You don’t get to pick and choose. At least, I don’t think so.”

Billy didn’t answer straight off. He just stood, his shoulder leaned on the door frame, and watched her work on the second shoe, admiring her intense concentration.

After a few seconds, she looked up at him.

“You got quiet.”

“Kids your age shouldn’t say things like that.”

“Why? Was it stupid?”

“No. It was smart. Too smart.”

“No such thing as too smart. Aha! Got it!”

She laced up the second shoe and strode out into the middle of the kitchen floor, tapping her way through the time step routine Billy had taught her, and managing to get every single step in the wrong order. But it was danced with good feeling, at least in the lower half of her body.

The sound, though not perfect against kitchen linoleum, again filled Billy’s stunted gut with memories. They could not, he noticed, be sorted out into two groups, those to be kept and those to be discarded. They came as a package deal.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Billy said, focusing back on the dance performance itself. “You forgot a few things.”

“Well, I didn’t have a lesson yesterday.”

“Let’s not work on the time step right now.”

“But I want to learn it!”

“You will. I promise. But I want you to have arms. Remember when I told you I want you to have arms?”

“I have arms,” she said, holding them up as proof.

“I told you what that means. Remember? When I say I want you to have arms?”

“Oh! Yeah! Um. Let me think. Nope. Sorry. I don’t remember.”

“It means you’re concentrating so hard on getting the steps right that you’re only thinking about your feet. Which I understand, because the time step involves some remembering, especially after just one lesson. But I want you to get off on the right foot, no pun intended.”

“You did so intend that.”

“Actually, I really didn’t. Here’s what I’m saying. I don’t want you getting into a bad habit of moving your feet correctly but holding the rest of your body stiff, like a statue. This is not Riverdance, you know. Not that there’s anything wrong with Riverdance. Only that this isn’t it.”

“I don’t know what that river thing is.”

“Right. I might have predicted that. Let’s do something really basic with your feet. Let’s do a series of stamps and stomps, and when you get into a simple rhythm with that, you can start to focus on your torso and arms.”

“What’s a torso?”

“Upper body.”

“Oh. Why didn’t you just say so?”

“No talking. No giving the teacher a hard time. Especially not at these prices. Now. With your right foot. Stamp.”

Grace brought her right foot down with a satisfying sound, then raised it again, looking up at him and smiling.

“That’s not a stamp. That’s a stomp.”

“Darn it,” she said, smile fading. “I always get those two confused.”

“I told you how to remember the difference. Remember what I taught you about that?”