Previously – Chapter 13: The Gala
By Monday lunchtime it was a fact in the town, exactly as he’d said.
Mia knew because Mrs. Fletcher congratulated her at the desk before she had her coat off, and because two mothers asked in the four o’clock about costume costs for December, and because a man she had never met stopped her outside the pharmacy to say he’d heard about the big show and that it was about time somebody put Pine Falls on the map.
Adam was civil all day. He said good morning. He asked after her hip. He handed her the roster for the teens without their fingers touching, and he took the beginners himself so she wouldn’t have to stand. It was thoughtful. It also meant she did not have to be in a room with him for fifty minutes.
He also, at some point between nine and eleven, telephoned six families and asked them what time on a Saturday would be easier, and by Tuesday the intermediate class had moved to nine-fifteen and Kelly Nowak had sent a message with four exclamation marks in it.
At half past five Lucy came out of the office with a printed spreadsheet and put it on the barre in front of them both, and stood there until they looked at it.
“Enrollment,” she said. “Since Saturday. Nine inquiries, four booked trials, and Kelly Nowak wants to know if the December thing is extra.” She tapped the paper. “That’s more than October and November put together. I’m not making a point.”
“You’re making a point,” Adam said.
“I’m making a spreadsheet.” Lucy went back into the office and shut the door with her elbow.
Adam looked at the sheet for a long moment.
“One condition,” he said.
“Say it.”
“I’m at the table. Every meeting, every call, every time she puts a piece of paper in front of anybody. If she wants to talk to Lockwood she talks to Lockwood, and Lockwood is me.” He rolled the spreadsheet into a tube and unrolled it again. “That’s not about Saturday. That’s the actual condition.”
“Fine.”
“I mean it, Mia.”
“I said fine. I’d have asked for the same thing.” She let a beat go by. “Are we all right?”
“No,” Adam said, and picked up the roster, and went to teach the six o’clock.
* * *
Tori stayed behind on Tuesday, as she did most Tuesdays, because the bus to her end of the valley did not come until twenty to nine and there was nowhere in Pine Falls to be for an hour and ten minutes in November.
The arrangement, unspoken, three months old, was: Mia stayed too.
“Show me the thing,” Mia said.
“It’s not ready.”
“It’s never going to be ready, that’s what ready means. Show me the thing.”
Tori put her phone on the floor, propped against a water bottle, and played fourteen seconds of something she had filmed in her bedroom, in which she attempted a turn sequence in a space approximately the size of a bath mat and hit a chest of drawers with her hand.
“Right,” Mia said.
“I know.”
“How big is your room?”
“It’s not big.” Tori was going red. “It’s like. If you stand in the middle you can touch two walls.”
“You can touch two walls.”
“Not at the same time.”
“Well, thank God.” Mia levered herself around on the stool. “Do it here, in the actual space.”
Tori did it in the actual space and it was clean and correct and entirely dead.
“Again.”
She did it again. Same.
“Right. Stop.” Mia sat back. “What’s it about?”
Tori’s face went blank.
“It’s a turn.”
“It’s not a turn, it’s four seconds of a person doing something, and you can do the turn, you fixed the turn in September and you’ve done it four hundred times since. Now tell me what it’s about.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Nobody does at sixteen, that’s why I’m asking you at sixteen.” Mia leaned forward. “Somebody is going to put you in a room in about three years with forty other people who all have your technique, and the only question anybody will ask is what you’re doing it for, and you will have four seconds to answer it, and if the answer is nothing they will take the next girl.”
Tori stood in the middle of the floor with her arms still up.
“That’s terrifying,” she said.
“Yes.”
“How do I find out?”
“You don’t find out. You decide.” Mia rubbed her hip absently. “Do it again and this time decide something before you start. Doesn’t matter what. It can be stupid. Decide it and don’t tell me and I’ll know.”
Tori did it again.
It was messier and about four times better, and Mia sat on a stool and watched a girl put something into a phrase for the first time in her life, and did not say anything at all when it finished, because there are moments where saying something is theft.
“Was that.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not telling you what it was.”
“Correct,” said Mia. “That’s the whole job. Don’t ever tell anybody.”
Tori dropped down onto the floor next to the stool, flat on her back, arms out, glowing.
Her shoes were on the floor beside her, and Mia looked at them because she could not help it. Dead across the box, the shank gone soft, the satin worn through at the platform on the left. A month past the point where a girl should have stopped dancing in them, and probably two.
Mia did not say anything about it. There was nothing to say that did not end in a number, and Adam had once told her about a man who drove into town with cash rather than let anybody watch a card decline.
She wrote it on the back of her hand instead.
“Ms. Chambers.”
“Mm.”
“Is it true about December? The eight hundred seats?”
“It’s true.”
“Are we good enough?”
Mia considered lying to her, and didn’t.
“You are,” she said. “Some of the others aren’t, and it doesn’t matter, because I’m going to build something that doesn’t need them to be.”
Tori lay on the floor of the studio, looking at the ceiling.
“My dad’s going to have to take the day off,” she said. “For December. He doesn’t get paid if he doesn’t go in, so.” A pause. “He’ll do it. He’ll just be weird about it for about a month.”
Mia looked at the top of her head and let it stand, and the bus came at twenty to nine.
* * *
The terms came back from the lawyer that evening with two changes in the margin, and after Tori’s bus had gone Adam and Mia sat at the reception desk with the office lamp on and the rest of the building dark, going through it clause by clause.
It went better than either of them expected. By ten they had a marked-up copy, a list of four questions, and an argument about the finale. He wanted it to be six minutes and she wanted it to be nine.
“Nine minutes is a long time to hold eight hundred people.”
“Nine minutes is a long time if it’s six minutes of material. It won’t be.”
“You don’t know that yet, you haven’t made it.”
“I know what it needs to do.” She pulled the legal pad over. “It has to have both studios on the stage at once, and it has to not look like two studios on a stage at once. That’s the whole problem, and you cannot solve it in six minutes because it takes four just to get everybody on.”
“So do it in two halves.”
“Then it’s a gala and everyone goes home having watched a competition.” She drew a long line and put forty-one dots along it, and looked at them, and did not know yet what they meant. “It has to be one thing. If it’s one thing we’re a partner. If it’s two things we’re a support act with better lighting than we’re used to.”
Adam laughed. It was the first time in two days.
“Nine minutes,” he said. “God help us.”
“Nine minutes.”
He capped the pen. Outside a truck went past and the headlights swung across the mirrors and away.
“Can I ask you something stupid,” he said.
“Always.”
“If she asked you again.” He said it lightly, and he was not looking at her, and he was arranging the papers into a stack that did not need arranging. “After December. Not the stream, the other thing. Head of choreography or whatever they’d call it by then. Proper floor, a hundred and forty kids, a budget, six full-time staff, a physical therapist on Tuesdays, no breaker panel. If she came back in February with that.”
It was a joke. She understood, immediately and completely, that it was a joke and that all she had to do was say don’t be ridiculous in the right tone.
And she thought about the floor.
It was only a second. It was less than a second, probably. It was the length of time it takes to see a sprung basketweave under stage light and hear a woman say forty years in front of you and feel, in the middle of your own chest, the small disgraceful lift of being wanted by somebody competent.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.
Adam looked up.
He looked at her for about as long as she had taken, and whatever he had been going to say next did not get said. He squared the stack of papers on the desk one more time.
“No,” he said. “Ridiculous.”
Then he turned off the office lamp.
Outside, he lifted the door by the handle while he turned the key, and it took him three goes, and Mia stood on the sidewalk in the cold and watched a man not ask her a question.
* * *
On Wednesday morning Mia went in early to use the office printer and found Connor there at twenty past eight, in an apron, mopping the changing room.
She stood in the doorway for a moment before he saw her.
“Morning.”
“Oh.” He straightened up fast. “Hi. Miss.”
“What are you doing?”
“Work-study.” He said it the way you say a phrase you have been given. “It’s the thing Adam set up. I do the mopping and the bins Tuesday and Wednesday and Saturday, and I do the recycling, and it comes off the fees.”
“How much does it come off?”
Connor’s ears went red.
“All of it,” he said.
What she had not previously done was stand in a doorway at twenty past eight in the morning and watch a seventeen-year-old mop a changing room he did not need to mop, in an apron, with the radio on.
He was doing the corners. Nobody does the corners.
“Connor.”
“Yeah.”
“How long does this actually take you?”
“About forty minutes.”
“And Adam pays you for six hours a week.”
“Yeah.” He wrung the mop out. “I know. He said don’t mention it and I’ve not mentioned it.”
“Then why are you doing the corners?”
Connor Reyes looked at the mop for a while.
“Because it’s a job,” he said. “It’s the first one I’ve had. And if I do it badly it’s charity, and if I do it properly it isn’t, and I’d rather it wasn’t.”
Mia stood in the doorway of a changing room the size of a generous closet and revised, entirely and against her will, a position she had been extremely certain about for six weeks.
She did not say so to Adam, then or later, which she would eventually decide was the meanest thing she did that autumn.
* * *
Danielle’s email had arrived on Monday morning, and the coffee invitation came with it.
Terms attached, revised after conversation with counsel. Am in Pine Falls Wednesday for a site visit at the arts center. Coffee at 10, the place on Main with the chalkboard? I’d like twenty minutes without the men. D.K.
Mia read it three times. She showed the terms to Adam and did not show him the last line, and was aware of doing it, and did it anyway.
The café on Main had been the bookstore when Mia was in high school. It had exposed brick now, and a chalkboard, and eleven kinds of syrup. Danielle was already at the back table at five to ten with a black coffee and a laptop she closed when Mia came in.
“You walked,” she said.
“I parked around the corner.”
“You walked from around the corner.” Danielle nodded at the chair opposite. “Sit down before you fall down, and I mean that in the most self-interested way possible. If you injure yourself between now and the twentieth I’ve got a co-choreographer credit on a program and nobody to fill it.”
Mia sat. It was a relief and she resented the relief.
“Twenty minutes without the men,” she said.
“Twenty minutes without the performance.” Danielle turned her cup a quarter turn. “Here’s my read on your studio. Tell me where I’m wrong.”
“I didn’t say you could give me a read on my studio.”
“You’ll want it.” Danielle didn’t blink. “He’s been under water since the spring and covering it out of the sale of something. A car, or his wife’s life insurance, or both. He doesn’t chase what he’s owed, and nobody has made him act on the numbers in three years, because everybody in this town loved his wife.” Danielle drank. “Lockwood closes in the fall, and it closes owing money, and the last thing that happens is that Adam Lockwood sells his wife’s dance studio at a loss to a man who wants to put a physical therapy practice in it.”
The café made its noises. Somebody’s milk steamed.
“You’re not going to tell me I’m wrong,” Danielle said, “because you’ve seen the books.”
“I’ve seen the books.”
“How bad.”
“Worse than that,” Mia said.
Danielle nodded slowly, and to her credit did not look pleased.
“You could buy him,” Mia said. “Couldn’t you. If you waited a year you could buy the whole thing for the price of the lease and put your name over the door and have the town as well as the county.”
“Yes.”
“So why the show.”
“Because a studio I buy in a fire sale comes with a parking lot and a barre and no people in it.” Danielle set the cup down. “The families won’t come. They’d sooner drive their children forty minutes to a church hall than give me the satisfaction, and I know that, because I’ve bought two studios and it happened both times, and both times I lost money for four years. You cannot purchase affection. You can only be adjacent to it and hope some of it comes off on you.” She said it without any bitterness whatsoever. “So: a show. Both names. And in three years, if it goes well, nobody in Pine Falls can remember which of us was the villain.”
“That’s honest.”
“It’s Wednesday, I’m tired, and I’ve got a site visit at eleven.” Danielle turned the cup back. “Here’s the second half, and this is the part I actually wanted the twenty minutes for. You are propping up a business that cannot be propped up, in a town you left at eighteen, because you have nowhere else to be. And you’re doing it well. That’s what makes it interesting. Most people who wash up somewhere are no good when they get there.”
“I’m not washed up.”
“I didn’t say washed up, I said washed in.” A small correction, made precisely. “You’re thirty-four with a labral tear and a professional career behind you and forty years in front of you, and you’re spending them on eighty children in a room with a bad breaker panel because a man you knew when you were seventeen needed the help. That is either the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard or the worst-run life I’ve ever seen and I honestly cannot tell which.”
Mia had come in ready for the fight. What she had not been ready for was to find that there was no fight in it, and that Danielle was not enjoying herself.
“You want me to say you’re right,” she said.
“I want you to have heard it once from somebody who has no reason to be kind about it.” Danielle opened the laptop again. “That’s the twenty minutes. The terms are fine, your lawyer will want two changes, tell him to ask for equal billing on print and I’ll give it to him so he feels he’s earned his fee. Anything else?”
“You could have said all that in an email.”
“No,” Danielle said, “I couldn’t,” and something went across her face and was gone, and Mia thought, with real surprise: she has nobody to talk to either.
They walked out together. On the sidewalk Danielle put her sunglasses on against a sky that did not need them.
“One thing,” she said, half-turned, keys in hand. “That girl. Second from the left in the black piece, the one who took the fall out of the turn.”
“Tori.”
“Tori.”
“Tori Dorsey.” Mia heard herself, and heard the pride in it, and did not stop. “She’s sixteen. She came to us at twelve off the internet, and she taught herself to spot off a light switch. She’s the best raw instrument I’ve ever had my hands on and I’m including two people I was in a company with.”
Danielle nodded slowly.
“That’s a nice thing to be able to say about somebody,” she said, and got in her car.
Mia went back inside and called Celeste at Crestwood and asked, without explaining, whether their supplier did a trade rate on a dozen pairs.
* * *
Sylvia and Don came on Wednesday, at four, with a Tupperware box of brownies balanced on the flat of Sylvia’s hand like a woman who had carried a lot of things into a lot of rooms.
“We won’t stay,” Sylvia said, which meant they would stay for an hour.
They set up at the desk. Mrs. Fletcher fetched paper napkins. Two of the beginners’ mothers materialized out of nowhere the way they did whenever there was food, and for a while it was pleasant and ordinary, and Adam came out of the office and was better with Sylvia than he had been with anybody in three days.
“There’s no nuts in these,” Sylvia said, at Mrs. Fletcher, pointedly.
“I never said there were nuts in the brownies. I have never once said that.”
Don stood slightly apart with a brownie he wasn’t eating.
“So you’re doing this thing with the Crestwood outfit,” he said.
“We are.”
“Hm.” He turned the brownie around. “Heather wouldn’t have.”
The temperature at the desk dropped about four degrees. Sylvia said, “Don.”
“I’m not saying it’s. Well.”
“You’ve said it now.”
“I’m saying she wouldn’t have, that’s all. She’d have said we do our own show in our own room and if fourteen people come, fourteen people come.” Don looked up, and to Mia’s astonishment his eyes were wet, and he was entirely unaware of it. “She used to say that. She’d say it to me in the car.”
Nobody said anything. One of the beginners’ mothers discovered an urgent need to be in the parking lot.
“He’s not wrong,” Sylvia said at last, to Mia, in a level voice. “She wouldn’t have. She was very stubborn and it cost them about four thousand dollars a year, and I told her so, and she didn’t listen to me either.” She put the lid back on the box, one corner at a time, all four. “Don, go and see if Frank’s still got the truck out front, we’re blocking him.”
Don went, gratefully, the way a man goes when he’s been given a task.
“He didn’t mean anything by it,” Sylvia said.
“He meant it.”
“Yes.” Sylvia almost smiled. “He meant it and he didn’t mean anything by it, that’s Don, you get used to it. Forty-one years.” She watched him go out through the front. “He hasn’t said her name in front of anybody but me since the funeral. He said it just then and I don’t think he noticed.”
Mia had not known what to do with her hands for about a minute.
“Can I say something you won’t like either?” Sylvia said.
“Apparently it’s the week for it.”
“Heather made the dances and Adam kept the books.” Sylvia stopped. “No. That’s the version I say to Don, and it’s tidy, and it isn’t right.”
She was watching the floor, where a nine-year-old was practicing a turn badly and with great commitment, and she did not start again for a while.
“My daughter was why anybody came,” she said, “and he was why there was anywhere to come to, and neither of them said that out loud once in thirteen years, and I’ve never worked out which of them it was worse for. And now he’s doing both jobs. He can’t do hers. He knows he can’t.” Her mouth did something. “I don’t know how to finish that sentence. I’ve been trying to finish it since the funeral.”
Mia’s hands had gone still on the desk.
“And then you came home,” Sylvia said, “and I’m not saying that to be unkind, dear, I’m saying it because I don’t think anybody’s told you what job you’ve taken.” She picked up the box. “That’s all. Tell Adam the brownies are for the kids and not for him, he’ll eat six.”
* * *
He asked her to dinner on Wednesday, at his house, and got it out in one go with his back half turned, like a man setting down something heavy.
“There’s no crisis,” he said. “I want that understood. Nothing is broken. I’m not going to ask you about the contract and you’re not allowed to mention Danielle King.”
“That’s the strictest invitation I’ve ever had.”
“It’s the only one I’ve issued in two years,” said Adam, “so I’ve overthought it.”
The house was six minutes from the studio, small, blue, tidy in the way of a man who has one system and follows it. There was a rail by the front step that had not been there in October. Mia looked at it and said nothing, and he did not mention it either, and that was the entire conversation about it, and it was one of the best conversations they ever had.
He cooked badly. He cooked with enormous competence and no imagination whatsoever: a chicken, some potatoes, a bag of green beans, all of it correct and none of it interesting, and he was so plainly braced for her to say something that she waited until they sat down.
“This is very good.”
“It isn’t.”
“It’s completely fine.”
“Fine,” said Adam, with feeling. “Heather did the food. I do the shopping, and I have done the shopping for two years, and every single week I buy a chicken and some potatoes and a bag of green beans. I’ve noticed. I’ve noticed for about eighteen months and I have never once done anything about it.”
They ate. It was dark by half past four now. There was a clock somewhere doing what clocks do.
And they talked about nothing for two hours.
That was the thing Mia thought about afterwards, on and off, for a long time: that in eleven weeks of building a showcase and a business and a fight, they had never once found out what the other one was like when there was nothing to do.
He was funnier than he was at the studio. He was much worse at ending a story. He had strong opinions about roofing. He had been to Portugal once, in 2016, and had spent five days entirely miserable and had loved it, and could not explain why, and tried for a full ten minutes. He asked her what a company class was actually like at eight in the morning, and listened to the answer, all of it, including the boring parts, and then asked a second question that proved he had listened.
She told him about the pointe shoes.
She had not told anybody. Not Lucy, not her mother, and she was not entirely sure why she told him, except that he had said there’s no crisis with his back half turned and had meant it.
“They’re still in the car?”
“They’re in a shopping bag in my mother’s garage. Four pairs. I couldn’t put them in a box in Chicago and I couldn’t throw them away, so I drove them two thousand miles, and now they’re in a garage in Pine Falls, and nothing whatsoever has been solved.”
Adam thought about that properly. It took him a while.
“Do you want me to say something about it,” he said, “or do you want to have told me?”
“The second one.”
“Right,” he said, and got up and did the plates.
At the door, later, he did not walk her to the car, because she had asked him in October not to, and he had remembered.
“Same time next week?”
“Is that a thing we do now?”
“I’d like it to be a thing we do now.”
“Then buy something that isn’t a chicken,” Mia said, and drove home, and sat in her mother’s driveway with the engine off for a while, smiling at nothing, like an idiot.
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