Previously – Chapter 9: The Annex
The same eleven days looked different from the studio floor.
Crestwood opened its doors for trial classes on October twentieth, two days after the Harvest Fest and the day after Adam Lockwood put a green notebook back down the side of a box, with the formal opening night held back until November so that Danielle King could have a marquee and a man off the television.
Lockwood lost its first family on the twenty-first. It was the Wicklows’ granddaughter, and nobody was surprised. It lost two more on the twenty-third. On the twenty-fourth, Diane Coyle came into the lobby with her coat still buttoned and said, “I need to talk to you about Saturdays,” and Mia’s stomach went down a floor.
It was not Bethany leaving. It was that Bethany wanted to do the Crestwood Tuesday as well, and Diane wanted to know whether that was all right, and had gone a mottled sort of color asking.
“It’s completely all right.”
“It feels.”
“Diane, if my daughter had a back like that I’d have her in six days a week and I’d remortgage the house.” Mia meant it and it came out about a beat too fast. “Go. Do the Tuesday. If they’re any good she’ll be better by March, and if they’re not you’ll know inside a month.”
Diane cried a bit, and apologized for crying, and went.
Adam took it well, which was to say that he said “that’s fine, that’s good for her” and then went and did the supply closet for an hour and a half.
The Brennans went that same week, and that one hurt, because Kyle Brennan had spent October eighteenth on his knees in three inches of water and had fallen asleep in the fourth row.
He came in himself to say it. Almost nobody did that.
“It’s not about Saturday.”
“Kyle.”
“No, I want to say it, because I’ve been rehearsing it in the van.” He had his hat in his hands. Every man in that town apparently did. “Ellie’s twelve. She’s not going to be a dancer, we both know that, she can’t hold a leg up. But she loves it, and they’ve got a thing out there on a Wednesday where they do the hip-hop and the jazz and all of it, and she came home from the trial class and talked at me for forty minutes.”
“Then that’s the right decision.”
“It doesn’t feel like the right decision.” He looked at the corridor. “I fixed those lights.”
“You did.”
“Twice,” said Kyle Brennan, and then, in a completely different voice, “Look, if anything else goes wrong in this building, you call me. I don’t care whose kid’s where. You call me.”
Then he went out to the van and sat in it for a while before he started it.
By the end of the month the Saturday class had holes in it you could see from the doorway. Some had gone outright, which was clean and hurt once. The rest had split the week between the two studios, which was not clean and hurt every Saturday, because a child who splits their week has already decided and is only being polite about the date.
Four more went in the week after the hearing, and one of the mothers used the words within two years to Mrs. Fletcher, at the desk, pleasantly, without appearing to know where she had gotten them.
Lucy did the numbers on the twenty-eighth.
“You want it straight?”
“Always.”
“Straight, then. September was your best month since April and November is going to be your worst since I started doing this. Jensen goes up in January.” Lucy did not look up from the laptop. “The insurance settled the ceiling at about half what I claimed, because of the wording, about which I did have a feeling. And there’s four thousand in the account, which is two months if nothing happens and about three weeks if anything does.”
Nobody said anything.
“There’s a thing I have to tell you as well,” Lucy said, “and I’ve been putting it off for two weeks.”
Adam looked up.
“Ray’s making me full-time from January. Five days.” Lucy shut the laptop halfway. “It’s four hundred a month more and it’s health insurance and I’m thirty-four and I’ve got a roof with a hole in it, so.”
“Lucy, that’s.”
“Don’t say congratulations in that voice or I’ll cry and I’ve got a face on.” She squared the laptop against the desk edge. “It means I can’t do six hours here any more. I can do about two. I can do the payroll and the bank and I cannot do the chasing, and the chasing is the bit that actually brings the money in.”
“I’ll do the chasing,” Adam said.
“You will absolutely not do the chasing, you’re the worst chaser I have ever met, you called the Brennans about fourteen dollars in September and ended up giving them a free term.” Lucy stood up. “I’ll find somebody. I’ve got until January.”
She got as far as the door.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “For what it’s worth, I’ve done your books for two years and I’d have done them for ten, and Ray offered me the five days in August and I’ve been sitting on it since August.”
She went out. Adam looked at the closed laptop.
Mia found her in the parking lot ten minutes later, sitting in the pharmacy car with the engine off and the interior light on, doing nothing at all.
Mia got in the passenger side. It took a while.
“Don’t,” said Lucy.
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You’ve got in a car.”
They sat there. Main Street did what Main Street did at half past six at the end of October, which was nothing.
“August,” Mia said.
“August.”
“Why didn’t you take it in August?”
Lucy put her hands on the wheel and took them off again.
“Because he’d have had nobody,” she said. “It was August, Mia. You weren’t here. Beverly Ann had packed it in. It was him and Mrs. Fletcher and a drawer of fees nobody had ever invoiced, and if I’d gone in August that studio would have shut by Christmas and I’d have known it was me.” She laughed, badly. “So I said no to four hundred dollars a month and health insurance because I couldn’t face being the one, and I’ve spent three months being extremely noble about it in my own head, and then last week the roof started coming in over the back bedroom.”
“Lucy.”
“I’m thirty-four.” Her voice went. “I’m thirty-four and I do books for a dance studio for nothing and books for the diner for eighty dollars, and I have four thousand dollars in a savings account, and there is nobody coming to fix the roof except me.”
Mia sat in the passenger seat of a Corolla and understood that she had been in this town for two months and had not once asked Lucy Henshaw a single question about her own life.
“Take the five days,” she said.
“I’ve taken the five days.”
“Then take them without doing this.” Mia turned as far as her hip allowed. “You’ve done two years for free and you’re giving two months’ notice and you’re sitting in a parking lot crying about it. Nobody in the history of employment has ever left a job better.”
“He’ll say something nice,” Lucy said, wretchedly. “That’s the problem. He’ll say something nice and he’ll mean it and I’ll feel like a bastard.”
“He absolutely will,” said Mia. “He’s monstrous like that.”
And Lucy laughed, and blew her nose on a pharmacy receipt, and after a while she said: “How’s your hip?”
“Bad.”
“How bad?”
“Peterson’s got something to say to me on Wednesday,” Mia said, “and I already know what it is, and I’m not going to talk about it in a car.”
“Right,” Lucy said. “Then we’ll talk about it in a pub,” and started the engine.
* * *
Dr. Peterson’s office, October twenty-ninth, and he had two scans up side by side.
“September and last week,” he said. “Look at that and that.”
Mia looked.
“I can’t see a difference.”
“There isn’t much of one. That’s what I want to talk to you about.” He turned in the chair. “There’s a small progression at the anterosuperior margin. If I saw that over two years I’d say it’s normal. I’m seeing it over seven weeks.”
“Because of the chest of drawers.”
“Because of the chest of drawers, and because of four months of walking on a compensation pattern before Sasha got hold of you, and because of whatever else you’ve been doing that neither of us knows about.” He said it without any accusation. “It doesn’t matter which. What matters is the rate.”
“So what does that mean.”
“It means we stop treating this as a recovery and start treating it as a resource.” Dr. Peterson took his glasses off. “In September I told you there was a version of next summer where you’re taking class again. I want to withdraw that.”
The room was very quiet.
“I’m not saying no,” he said. “I’m saying I shouldn’t have offered it, because I offered it to be encouraging and it’s the sort of thing a person builds a year around. What I can tell you now is that the joint surface is going faster than I’d like, and that every single thing you do with that hip between now and about your fiftieth birthday is a withdrawal from an account that does not get topped up.”
“How much is in the account?”
“I don’t know.”
“Guess.”
“No,” said Dr. Peterson.
Mia sat with her hands in her lap.
“Right,” she said. “Then tell me the ultimatum, because you’ve had one in your pocket since I sat down.”
He almost smiled.
“Two things. The first is that I’m formally putting no demonstrating in writing to you and to Sasha, and it isn’t a suggestion, it’s the whole of the medical advice, and I’d like you to notice that I’ve never done that before.”
“And the second?”
“The second is that if you present at this office again with an acute change, we’re not managing it, we’re operating.” He put the glasses back on. “And a revision arthroscopy at your age with that surface is a salvage procedure. It buys comfort. It does not buy function. You’d be doing it to be able to walk to a store in ten years’ time without thinking about it.”
“And the offer stands until February,” Mia said. “That’s what everybody’s going to tell me this month, apparently. Everything’s got a date on it.”
“Everything has always had a date on it,” said Dr. Peterson. “You’ve just never had to look at any of them before.”
Mia drove home over the pass and did not put the radio on.
She thought: he said fifty. He didn’t say I can’t dance. He said fifty.
And then, four miles later, with total clarity: he did say I can’t dance. He said it in September and he said it more politely today and you have decided to hear a different sentence twice.
* * *
Danielle King called on October thirtieth and asked if she could buy her a coffee, and Mia said yes before she had worked out why.
They met at the café on Main, at the back table, and Danielle had a black coffee and a laptop she did not open.
“I’ll be quick, because I’ve got a site meeting at eleven and because you’ll want time to be furious about this in private.”
“That’s an opening.”
“I want you to come and run the pre-professional stream at Crestwood,” Danielle said.
Mia put her cup down.
“Full time, four days a week, teaching and choreographing. Twelve to eighteens. About twenty-six kids in it at the moment and it’ll be forty by September, and it is at present being run by Celeste, who is excellent and who does not want it and has told me so twice.” Danielle turned her cup a quarter turn. “Sixty-two thousand. Health insurance from day one. And a budget of sixteen thousand a year for guest work. That’s not enormous. It’s nine thousand more than anybody in this county has ever had.”
Mia did not say anything for a moment.
“You have a physical therapist on Tuesdays and Thursdays,” she said.
“You’ve been in the building.”
“I took the tour.”
“Of course you did.” Danielle looked, for a moment, genuinely pleased. “Yes. Two days a week, shared with a sports rehab practice, and it would be part of your terms, and before you ask, yes, I have absolutely thought about the fact that you’d be on a proper floor with a physical therapist on site instead of a maple floor from 1938 with a soft patch.”
“That’s very well aimed.”
“It’s aimed exactly where I meant it.” Danielle sat back. “Now. Before you answer, three things you should hear from me rather than work out later and hold against me.”
“Go on.”
“One. I am doing this partly to hurt Lockwood, and it will hurt Lockwood, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Two. I’d have offered you this in September if I’d seen you work, and I hadn’t, and that’s my failure and not a strategy.” She held up the third finger. “Three. You will not get another offer like this. Not in this county, and not with that hip, and I say that with complete respect and no pleasure at all.”
The café made its noises. Somebody’s milk steamed.
Mia sat in a café that had been a bookstore when she was seventeen and did, in about nine seconds, a very great deal of arithmetic.
Sixty-two thousand dollars was more than she had earned in any year of her professional life except two. It was health insurance. She had not had health insurance since August thirty-first. There was a wire tray on her mother’s hall table that had started in September with two envelopes in it and would not shut now, and Mia had developed a way of putting the mail down that did not involve looking at it, and Patricia had developed a way of not asking, and neither of them had ever said a word about either. It was four days a week, which was a hip’s worth of days. It was a floor with a basketweave under it and a woman with hands two mornings a week whose entire job was to keep the joint she had left inside her body.
It was, and this was the part that went through her like cold water, a career. Not a stopgap and not a kindness. Somebody with money had looked at what she could still do and priced it.
Nobody had priced her since March. That was the thing about being injured that nobody mentioned: the market simply stops quoting.
“No,” Mia said.
“You haven’t thought about it.”
“I’ve thought about it since September seventeenth, in the abstract, about twelve times, and I’ve just thought about it very hard for nine seconds, and the answer’s no.”
“Why?”
And that, Mia found, was the problem.
Because she had a list. She had four items on it, and every single one of them was a reason, and not one of them was the reason, and she could feel the difference from the inside as clearly as you feel a false note.
“Because there are eleven kids in a room in this town,” she said, “and if I go, half of them stop.”
“That’s true and it isn’t why.”
“It’s part of why.”
“It’s about ten percent of why,” said Danielle, “and I’d have taken the other ninety if you’d been prepared to say it out loud, and you’re not, and that’s fine.” She closed the laptop. She had never opened it. “The offer stands until February first. After that I’ll have given it to somebody in Seattle who’ll take it in about four minutes.”
“Here’s what I think it is,” Danielle said, instead of leaving. “And then I’ll go, and you can be furious in the car.”
“Go on.”
“I think you have spent fifteen years being extremely good at a thing that somebody else decided the shape of.” She said it without any unkindness at all. “Somebody chose the repertoire. Somebody cast you. Somebody set the schedule and hired the teacher and picked the music and told you where to stand, and you were superb at all of it, and none of it was yours.”
Mia did not say anything.
“And in September you walked into a building with a bad floor and a man who has no idea what he’s doing, and for the first time in your professional life nobody in the room outranked you.” Danielle turned the cup. “That’s not loyalty. That’s not the children and it’s not the town and it certainly isn’t Adam Lockwood, whatever the whole of St Luke’s thinks. You’ve found out what it’s like to be the person who decides, and you are not going to give that up to run a stream in a building I own.”
The café made its noises.
“That’s very close,” Mia said.
“How close?”
“Close enough that I’m not going to tell you where it’s wrong.”
Danielle laughed, once, and it was the first entirely unguarded thing Mia had seen her do.
“Well,” she said. “That’s the answer, then, and it’s a better one than the four you gave me.” She stood up and put her coat on. “Plainly, you’d have hated the job. Twenty-six teenagers and a budget and a woman on your back about enrollment. You’d have lasted eighteen months and you’d have been the best thing that ever happened to my studio.”
“Then why offer it?”
“Because eighteen months of you is worth sixty-two thousand dollars,” said Danielle King, “and because I’d rather have you inside the building being difficult than outside it being right, in public, at a council meeting, in front of a hundred people.”
“For what it’s worth,” she said at the door, “I think you’ll say no in February as well. I just don’t think you’ll be able to tell anybody why then either.”
* * *
The Saturday class after that, on November first, had eleven names on the roster and seven bodies in the room.
That was the day Mia understood what a studio actually dies of. Not a dramatic evening; a Saturday morning where you look up and there is an amount of floor visible that should not be visible, and the ones who are left can see it too, and nobody says anything, and the room gets quieter.
She ran it hard for two hours out of sheer refusal.
At the end Connor stayed behind to stack chairs that did not need stacking.
“Miss.”
“Mia.”
“Miss.” He put a chair down. “Is Bethany going properly? Or is it just the Tuesday?”
“It’s just the Tuesday.”
“That’s what she said.” He picked the chair back up. “That’s what everyone says first.”
Mia did not have an answer for that, because he was entirely correct, and because she had watched it happen in two companies and a school.
“You’ll not go,” Connor said. It was not quite a question.
“I’m here till at least the spring.”
“Right.” He stacked the chair. “Because Tori won’t go if you’re here, and if Tori goes then I’m the only one over fifteen who can do anything, and I’d rather not be that, actually.”
He said it in an entirely level voice, at seventeen, in a T-shirt with a hole in the collar, and then went out to the lobby to wait for his lift and Mia sat in the considered chair for fifteen minutes with her hands in her lap.
* * *
Mia did not tell Adam.
She thought about it seven times over the following week and every single time she got as far as constructing the sentence and then found a reason to be somewhere else.
The reasons were extremely good. He had a rent increase in January and a half-empty roster and a bookkeeper leaving. He had, since the flood, been carrying the studio around on his back in a way that showed in his face by about four in the afternoon. Telling him that Crestwood had offered her sixty-two thousand dollars would be telling him, in the same breath, what the market rate was for the thing he was getting for free.
Those were all true.
The real reason arrived on Thursday night, while she was on a towel on the floor of her old bedroom doing a clamshell against a rubber band, and it arrived complete, in one piece, the way the bad ones do:
If I tell him, he’ll be pleased for me.
She stopped halfway through the second set and lay on the floor with the band around her thighs and looked at the ceiling.
He’ll be pleased for me, and he’ll say I should take it, and he’ll mean it, because he’s Adam and because he has spent two years being unable to ask a single person for anything. And then I’ll have to decide, and I’ll be deciding on my own, and he will have been extremely decent about it the entire time.
She lay on the floor of a bedroom with a shelf of trophies over her head.
Downstairs the television went off and her mother came up the stairs and paused on the landing the way she had done every night for two months without ever once knocking.
“Night, Mom,” Mia said.
“Night, love.”
Mia lay on the towel in the dark with the band around her thighs.
The house did what it did at eleven at night: the boiler, the stairs cooling, her mother turning over once.
She did not finish the exercises. It was the first time since September.
Then she got up off the floor and did them.
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