Previously – Chapter 12: Everybody Comes Home
She told him on Sunday morning, standing in the lobby with her coat already on, because she had learned that some conversations went better if there was a door in them.
“I’m going tonight.”
Adam was counting the float into the cash box. He didn’t stop.
“To Crestwood.”
“Yes.”
“Right.” He put the twenties down and squared them. “Can I ask why.”
“Because in three months they’ll have taken eleven of our families and I’d like to know what they’re taking them to.” She shifted the cane to her other hand. “Because I’ve never seen the building. Because everyone in that room tonight is going to be talking about us and I’d rather be standing in it than find out on Tuesday.”
“They’re not going to be talking about us, Mia.”
“They’re going to be talking about us.”
He shut the cash box. “You know what she’s doing.”
“She’s showing off a sprung floor to two hundred people. That’s not a plot, that’s a Sunday.”
“She left the card.”
“She left the card because she wants us to feel small, and if I stay home I’ll feel small in my mother’s kitchen instead. Same feeling, worse lighting.” It came out harder than she’d meant. She stopped. “Come with me.”
“No.”
“Adam.”
“No.” He looked up then. There was nothing hostile in it at all, and that was the trouble. “I’ll be the widower from the little studio, standing at the edge with a glass of something, being handled. Everybody there will know exactly who I am and exactly how much money I don’t have, and they’ll all be lovely about it.” He picked up the cash box. “You go. I’m not being noble, I’m being a coward, and I’ve made my peace with the difference.”
“That’s very tidy.”
“I’ve had practice.”
She almost left it there. She got as far as the door.
“What do you want me to look at?” she said.
He was quiet for a second.
“The floor,” he said. “Tell me what the floor’s like.”
* * *
Lucy picked her up at five thirty in the pharmacy car and had opinions the whole way.
“I’m not saying don’t go. I’m saying I’ve seen you get out of a low car and it takes twenty seconds and you hate every one of them.”
“It’s a normal car.”
“It’s a Corolla, Mia, it’s four inches off the road.” Lucy indicated left. “Also you’ve changed twice.”
“I have not.”
“You had the gray on when I got there and you’ve got the black on now, so unless a third party has been through your closet.”
“The gray had a thing on the shoulder.”
“The gray had nothing on the shoulder, I was standing next to it.” Lucy took the bend past the water tower. “Do you want to know what I think, or should I keep driving.”
“Keep driving.”
“I think you want them to see you,” Lucy said, and kept driving.
They were still two blocks out when Crestwood’s building came up on the right through the trees, and Mia had been prepared for it to be large and had not been prepared for it to be lit. The whole two-story front was glazed and glowing, warm white, like a hotel or a small airport, with a marquee sign in a typeface that had cost somebody money.
“Stop the car here.”
“There’s parking.”
“I know there’s parking.”
Lucy looked at her, and then at the building, and then she pulled over by a hedge on a residential street with no one in it.
“You want to walk in,” she said.
“I want to arrive.”
“Okay.” Lucy put the parking brake on. “Text me. Any time, and I mean any time, including in ninety seconds.”
Mia got out of the car in eight seconds and it took her four minutes to walk the two blocks, and she did not stop once, and by the time she reached the door her right leg was a hot wire from hip to knee and she had never in her life been more glad of anything.
* * *
Inside it smelled of new carpet and warm food.
Two hundred people in a room built to hold three hundred, holding glasses, and teenagers in black polo shirts with CRESTWOOD on the breast keeping the catering table full. By the stairs somebody had put up a step-and-repeat banner, silver on white, the same stock as the card in her coat pocket, and parents were photographing their children against it.
There was a raffle, and the woman running it had a float, an apron and a laminated sign, which meant somebody had thought about the raffle in a meeting.
Mia took a program and stood with her back to a pillar and read it so that she was a woman doing something. Founders’ welcome. A word from the Mayor of Crestwood, who existed. Studio tours at six-fifteen and six-forty-five. And then DEREK RAINES, Solo, from Aubade (2016), performed by arrangement.
Performed by arrangement. She had not seen that phrase on a program in two years, and she was surprised how much she disliked seeing it now.
She was still reading it when a woman said, “Oh,” about four feet away, in the tone of somebody discovering a wasp.
Kelly Nowak was standing by the program table with a paper plate in one hand and a nine-year-old attached to the other, and she had gone the color of the tablecloth.
“Mia. Hi. Hello.”
“Kelly.”
“We’re only. Sophie wanted to see the.” Kelly gestured with the plate. There were two mini quiches on it. “They sent a flyer to the school. It came in the bag.”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s just a look.”
“Kelly, it’s genuinely fine.” Mia crouched slightly, and it cost her something, to be level with the nine-year-old. “Hello, Sophie. Are you going to watch the man dance?”
“Mom says he was on TV.”
“He probably was.”
“Is he better than you?”
There was a small silence in which Kelly Nowak visibly wished to be dead.
“He’s very good,” Mia said. “He’s about the same as I used to be and he’s a lot better than I am now. That’s what happens. Go and get a cookie, they’ve got the good ones.”
The child went. Kelly stayed, wretched.
“We’re not leaving Lockwood.”
“You can leave Lockwood, Kelly.”
“We’re not.” She said it almost crossly. “She’s been at Adam’s since she was five. It’s just, they’ve got a Saturday intermediate at nine and ours is at eleven, and Marcus has the boys’ hockey at eleven, and I’ve been driving in two directions since September.” Kelly looked at the room. “That’s all it is. It’s a schedule.”
Mia thought: that’s how it happens. Not the floor. Not Derek Raines. Hockey at eleven.
“Tell Adam about the schedule,” she said. “Don’t tell me, tell him. He’ll move the class.”
“He won’t.”
“He absolutely will, he’d move it to four in the morning if you asked him. That’s his entire problem.” Mia straightened up. “Go on. Your mini quiches are getting cold and I’m going to go and look at their floor so I can be rude about it.”
Kelly Nowak laughed with a good deal of relief and went away, and Mia stood by the pillar and thought about Saturdays for a while.
“Mia Chambers.”
She turned.
For a second the woman was nobody. Then the fifteen years came off her, and it was the shape of her shoulders that did it, square and high, that corps posture you never fully lose, and Mia said, “Erin,” a half-beat too late.
“You have no idea who I am.”
“Erin Vasquez. Second year, Detroit. You did the Snow Queen understudy the year I did Clara.”
“I did the Snow Queen understudy for eight years,” Erin said, “and I never once went on,” and she laughed, and it was a completely happy laugh, and Mia felt the ground move an inch.
She was carrying a plastic tumbler of white wine. She had not, Mia thought, been holding herself in since roughly 2013.
“You’re here,” Mia said. “Do you teach?”
“God, no. I do the books. I do the books for four studios, this one’s the biggest.” Erin waved the tumbler at the room. “I quit in, what, ’14? Went back to Everett, did an accounting diploma at the community college, and I have never had a bad Christmas since.”
“Never?”
“Not one. Do you know what I did last Christmas? Nothing. I did nothing at all for two weeks. I watched television lying down.” Erin’s eyes were shining with what was unmistakably genuine joy. “Do you remember Christmases? Two shows on the day after Christmas and Yvonne screaming about the snow cloth?”
“Three shows on the twenty-seventh.”
“Three shows on the twenty-seventh.” Erin toasted her with the tumbler. “What about you, I heard you were.” Then she stopped, because she had looked down.
The cane. The right leg. The particular way Mia was standing with her weight stacked over her left.
“Oh,” Erin said. “Oh, honey. I saw the Chicago thing.”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine. Labrum?”
“Labrum.”
“God.” Erin’s face had gone soft and open and entirely without malice, and there was nowhere at all to put it. “I’m so sorry. Truly. Are you, I mean, what are you doing now?”
“I’m at Lockwood. In Pine Falls. Teaching, mostly. Some choreography.”
“Lockwood.” Erin’s eyes flicked, just slightly, toward the banner, toward the room, toward two hundred people and a sprung floor and a marquee sign. “That’s really nice. That’s a nice little studio.”
“It is,” Mia said.
“You always were the one who’d end up doing something good.” Erin touched her arm. “Listen, I’d better circulate, Danielle’s got me doing the raffle, but I mean it. It’s so good to see you.”
She went. She was, Mia understood, being completely sincere, and she would tell someone later this evening that she’d bumped into Mia Chambers and that it was sad, and she would mean that sincerely too.
Mia stood by the pillar with her program.
I have never had a bad Christmas since.
* * *
She took the six-fifteen tour, because she had promised Adam a report on the floor and because standing by a pillar for another half hour was going to be worse for her hip than walking.
It was led by a nineteen-year-old called Bryce who worked front desk and had clearly been given a script that morning.
“Everything’s Harlequin. Everything is climate controlled. That matters more than people think, because obviously wood.”
“Obviously wood,” said a man at the front, writing it down.
“And we’ve got the PT room, which we share with a sports rehab practice two days a week.”
Mia’s head came up. “You have a physical therapist on site?”
“Tuesdays and Thursdays. She does the injury screens for the pre-professional stream.”
“Injury screens.”
“Everyone in the pre-pro gets one in September and one in March.” Bryce said it the way you’d say everyone gets a locker. “It’s, um. I don’t actually know what’s in it. Should we do the changing rooms?”
Mia stood in the doorway of a physical therapy room in a dance studio in Pine Falls County and thought about March sixteenth in Chicago, and a lift she had been doing for ten weeks with a partner who was carrying an ankle thing he had not declared, and she thought: if somebody had screened me in September.
Then she thought: don’t. That way is a swamp.
Then she went and looked at the changing rooms. They were also very nice.
* * *
They opened the studio doors at ten to seven and let people file in and stand at the sides, and Mia got a place at the back with her shoulder against the wall.
She looked at the floor first, because she’d promised.
Sprung. Not a sprung subfloor with vinyl over it. A full basketweave with birch on top of it, and the marley laid tight with no seams anywhere she could see. There were four thousand square feet of unbroken floor in a room in Pine Falls County. She put her cane tip on it and pressed, and felt it give and come back.
Tell him it’s the floor he’d build if somebody gave him ninety thousand dollars, she thought. Tell him that. He’ll like knowing what it costs.
The mayor of Crestwood spoke for four minutes and used the phrase world class twice and right here in our own back yard once, and two hundred people applauded politely, and a small child somewhere said “when is the dancing” in a carrying voice.
Then Danielle took the microphone, and did ninety seconds that were noticeably better written than the mayor’s four minutes, and at the end of them she said:
“Before we start. We’ve got somebody in the room tonight who danced principal roles with the Detroit company and who is now, I’m delighted to say, working ten miles from this building. Mia Chambers. Mia, put your hand up so people can see where you are.”
Two hundred heads turned.
There was no cruelty in it anywhere, which was the difficulty. It was also a woman standing on her own new floor, in her own new building, presenting the best dancer in the county as an item of local interest.
Mia put her hand up. Two hundred people looked at her, standing at the back with a cane, and applauded, and it went on slightly too long the way applause does when a room is being kind rather than pleased, and a man near her said, “Well, there you go,” to nobody in particular.
Kelly Nowak, four rows in front, turned around and beamed at her with total uncomplicated pride, which was the worst part of the entire evening.
The intermediate ensemble was clean and slightly cold. The advanced piece was very good, better than Lockwood’s advanced, sharper, the unison genuinely unison, and Mia caught herself totting up the difference and made herself stop.
Then the lights came down properly, and Derek Raines walked out.
He was past forty and did not look it. He was smaller in person than in the photographs, the way they always were. He stood center with his back to the audience for eight full counts of silence before the music started. It was a cheap trick and it worked on everyone in the room including Mia.
And then he danced, and he was superb.
Not good for a regional draw. Not good for a man doing a favor for a studio opening. Superb. A clean, exact, unhurried technique, and that particular quality that cannot be taught, where the body arrives everywhere a fraction before you expect it and waits for you there.
He spent four minutes proving he could do anything, in diagonals that ate the floor and a fouetté sequence he took slightly under tempo on purpose, and then in the last section he did almost nothing at all: one long unfolding développé held on a rising note, and two hundred people in a dance studio in November stopped breathing in a way Mia had felt from the other side perhaps five times in her life.
She watched him with her arms folded and did not think about her hip once.
And what she thought, standing at the back with a program under her arm, was: everything resolves.
It was odd. It sat oddly in her all through the third section. Every phrase Derek danced went out and came back. Every fall was caught, every turn found its front, every extension arrived at a shape and held it long enough to be photographed. It was a solo built entirely out of completed sentences. It was beautiful, and it was, she reached for the word and got it just as the music dropped, reassuring.
Nothing in it is interrupted.
She turned the idea over. She was aware that it was the first genuinely new thing she had thought about dance in eight months, and that she was having it in the enemy’s building, at the back, standing on a cane.
The music finished. Derek held the last shape and let it go, and the room came up.
Mia clapped with the program under her arm, and she was still turning it over, nothing in it is interrupted, what would it look like if something were, when she realized Danielle King was standing beside her.
* * *
“Well?”
“He’s very good,” Mia said.
“He’s extremely good, and he costs me four thousand dollars a night plus flights, and the answer is yes, it’s worth it.” Danielle had a glass she wasn’t drinking from. She was watching the room empty back toward the lobby rather than watching Mia. “You came alone.”
“Adam’s busy.”
“Adam’s frightened.”
Mia said nothing.
“That’s not a criticism. He should be frightened, he’s running a business he can’t afford in a town that’s shrinking.” Danielle turned. “Come and look at the studio while it’s empty, I want to show you something.”
It was not a question and there was no version of refusing it that wasn’t a scene, and so Mia went, and they stood at the top of the empty floor with the house lights up and the folding chairs still steaming from two hundred people.
“Eight hundred seats,” Danielle said. “That’s the arts center at the college, ten minutes from here. I’ve got it for December twentieth, deposit paid, and a lighting rig and a stage crew and a set budget, and what I do not have is a reason for anybody in Pine Falls to drive out here in the snow to watch dancers they’ve never met.”
Mia waited.
“I want to do it together.” Danielle said it plainly, no wrapping on it. “Crestwood and Lockwood. One show, one program, both names. Your kids and mine. Derek does a piece. Your advanced group does a piece. And the finale is new, and it’s co-choreographed, and one of the two names on it is yours.”
“Why.”
“Because heart sells and I don’t have any.” She said it without self-pity, the way you’d report a supply problem. “I have technique and a building. You have forty families who cried in a room with no lights on yesterday afternoon. I’d like a share of that and I’m willing to pay for it in stage, crew, lighting, marketing and eight hundred seats.”
“And the split?”
“Fifty-fifty on tickets. I take the venue costs.”
Mia felt something arrive in her chest and put it away for later.
“Why me,” she said. “You’ve got Derek. You’ve got a name people have actually heard of.”
“Derek would give me six minutes of Derek.” Danielle said it fondly and with total accuracy. “He is a magnificent instrument and he has never had an idea in his life. Yesterday afternoon I sat in a room with a bad breaker panel and watched sixteen six-year-olds not clear the stage, and I have been doing this for nineteen years and I had not seen it done.” She turned the glass by the stem. “That’s what I’m buying. Not your résumé. That.”
“I can’t agree to this,” Mia said. “It’s not my studio.”
“No,” Danielle agreed. “It’s Adam Lockwood’s studio, and Adam Lockwood won’t come in a building with my name on it, so if we’re waiting for him we’re not doing it.”
“That’s not fair.”
“It’s completely fair and you know it, because you came and he didn’t.” Danielle turned her glass by the stem. “I’m not asking you to sign anything. I’m asking whether, in principle, Lockwood is interested in being on that stage in December.”
And there were people coming back in. Two men, one of them the mayor, and Erin with her raffle tickets, and three parents Mia recognized from the Pine Falls end of the county, and Kelly Nowak with her paper plate, who was looking directly at them.
Danielle had not raised her voice. She had also not lowered it.
She has done this on the floor, in the open, with an audience, Mia thought, with something that was almost admiration, and if I say I have to ask him, I am staff.
“In principle,” Mia said, “yes. We’re interested.”
“Good.” Danielle put out her hand, and Mia took it, and Kelly Nowak saw her take it. “I’ll have something in writing to you by Wednesday.”
* * *
Lucy said, “Well?” before Mia had the door shut.
“Drive.”
“Mia.”
“Drive, please.”
They got past the marquee sign and the hedge and out onto the county road with the heater roaring, and Mia sat with her hands flat on her knees and looked at the black trees going by.
“Erin Vasquez does their books,” Mia said, “and she is happier than anyone I have ever met.” She breathed out. “And Danielle King offered us a joint show in December at the arts center, eight hundred seats, fifty-fifty, co-choreographed finale, and I said yes.”
Lucy’s head came around.
“Eyes on the road.”
“You said yes?”
“In principle.”
“Mia.”
“I know.”
“You said yes in a room, in front of people.”
“I know, Lucy.”
She got her phone out before she could stop doing it. He answered on the second ring, and she could hear the studio behind him, the flat slap of the mop, half past nine on a Sunday night.
“How was it,” Adam said.
“The floor’s a full basketweave. Birch and marley, no seams. It’s the floor you’d build with ninety thousand dollars.”
A short laugh. “That’s grim. Thank you. Anything else?”
“Move the Saturday intermediate to nine.”
“What?”
“Kelly Nowak’s there. She’s not leaving, she’s got a scheduling problem, Marcus does hockey at eleven and she’s been driving in two directions since September and she was too embarrassed to tell you.” Mia rubbed her eyes. “There’ll be four more like her. Call them all this week and ask what time would be easier and then do whatever they say.”
A pause.
“That’s good,” Adam said. “That’s actually. Okay. Yes.”
“There’s something else.”
The mopping stopped.
She told him. All of it, straight through, in the order it had happened, without arranging it to sound better, because there wasn’t a way to arrange it that sounded better. The offer. The empty floor. The people coming back in. The handshake.
The silence at the other end went on long enough that Lucy glanced over.
“You said yes,” Adam said.
“I said in principle.”
“In front of Kelly Nowak.”
“Yes.”
“So by tomorrow lunchtime it’s a fact in this town whether I want it or not.”
“Adam.”
“You know what she did.” His voice hadn’t gone up at all. That was the frightening part. “She waited until you were in the building without me and she made the offer where people could see, and now if I say no I’m the man who turned down eight hundred seats out of pride. She’s made me the problem. In my own town.”
Mia closed her eyes.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s what she did.”
“And you said yes anyway.”
“I said yes anyway.”
“Why?”
The car went over the bridge at the Pine River, and the tires changed note.
“Because we can’t fill eight hundred seats,” Mia said. “Because we can’t fill a hundred and twenty, we did eighty yesterday and it was the best day of your year. Because Connor’s work-study is money you don’t have and Tori’s fees are money you don’t have, and in January Jensen puts the rent up and there is no version of the spring where you’re still open unless something changes.” Her voice was not steady and she let it not be steady. “Because you agreed yesterday, on that floor, that I’d tell you when you were doing something stupid, every time, and I’ve been sitting here trying to work out how to tell you that saying no to this would be the stupidest thing you’ve ever done, and I didn’t get the chance, so I said yes for you and I’d do it again.”
Nothing, from his end. The mop bucket, somewhere, on castors.
“I know I overstepped,” she said. “I’m not pretending I didn’t.”
“No,” Adam said. “You’re not.”
“Say something.”
“Send me the terms when they come,” he said. “I’ll be at the table.”
He hung up.
Lucy drove. The heater roared.
“For what it’s worth,” she said, without taking her eyes off the road, “you were right.”
“I know.”
Mia put her forehead against the glass. It was very cold and she left it there, and the black trees went past, and Lucy did not say anything else, and neither did she.
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