The Unexpected Waltz (2 page)

Strange thoughts preoccupy people near the end. They don’t regret mistakes, or at least the ones I meet don’t. Maybe those who have maimed or molested or raped lie on their deathbeds filled with remorse, but most people have lived polite little lives and they tend to think more about what they didn’t do. The chance that slipped by, the door they were afraid to enter, the lover they let walk away. Mr. Duggan in particular talked a lot about pirates. I’m pretty sure he’d never been a pirate—he was small and neatly groomed and well insured. He may have been remembering a dream or a movie, an old Halloween costume, or a game he played back in the bayou. Because that’s another thing about the dying: they circle all the way back to the beginning. I’ve heard them calling their siblings and childhood playmates, their voices breathless, as if they were running hard across an open field. Wait for me, they mumble. I’m right behind you, I’m right here.

“He has no idea what’s happening to him,” Mr. Duggan’s daughter used to say to me, her voice dripping with relief. “He doesn’t even know who he is anymore.” I’d nod because she needed me to nod, but inside I disagreed. I always had the funny feeling that this man was having the most lucid moments of his life. Later, after his daughter was gone, I used to go back into his room and lean over his bed. “Where are you now?” I’d ask him. “Tell me everything you see.”

Because this is what I have agreed to do: I have agreed to make tablescapes and to be the one who sits and waits once a situation has been declared truly hopeless. The doctors don’t stop by much anymore when the patient is CTD, as they say in the shorthand of oncology. Circling the drain. The nurses only come in for the pain meds and the families hover in the doorways, assuring one another that it’s over long before it really is. It mostly falls to us, to the volunteers, to be the final witnesses. “What does the shoreline look like?” I’d whisper to Mr. Duggan. “Are you off the coast of Africa? Or is it more like Jamaica? Maybe China?”

CTD. The phrase is funny and cruel and accurate. Because I’ve always imagined our lives to be funnel shaped. They grow narrow as we age and we all begin to swirl faster and faster until the concept of a day or an hour or a year no longer has any meaning. Maybe there’s even some sort of gentle sucking motion that pulls us down with the last breath and we pass from one world to the next just as easily as water goes through a tube. I hope so. I hope it was like that for Mr. Duggan. I wasn’t there when he died, but if you take all that stuff people say about Jesus and Buddha and Muhammad and set it aside, I’ve noticed it’s usually the pirates who go easiest when their time finally comes.

They haven’t given me a new client since Mark died. That’s hospice policy. After a volunteer loses someone in her own family they switch her to fund-raising or clerical work for a year. Thanks to Mark’s friends, most of whom have way more time and money than they know what to do with, I’ve been good at bringing in cash. I thought they might leave me in fund-raising indefinitely, but just last week when I was in the office, the client coordinator called out to me as I was walking past her door. She asked me how I was doing and I said fine, that it had been almost a year. She’d frowned and said, “A year? Already?”

So that’s why they’re calling, to give me a new client. I drop the phone back into my purse. Why didn’t I insist that the lawyer tell me how much money I have? I’m a grown woman and I have a right to know, but I let him cow me just like I always do. If Elyse had been there, she would have grabbed him by the lapel and said, “Bottom-line it for us,” but Elyse is living in Arizona now, throwing pots and drumming and chanting by the light of the moon with a circle of crazy women, and besides, I can’t rely on her forever. I’ll run by the library, I decide, and then I’ll stop at the grocery and pick up something for dinner. And tonight I’ll get my bottle of wine, go into Mark’s office, and write the law firm an e-mail. For the subject line I’ll type “Bottom-Line It for Me.”

CHAPTER
TWO

A
ND THAT'S HOW
it all started, at the lawyer’s office, with my being told I’m some variation of rich. Or maybe the story really begins an hour later, in the grocery store, at the moment when I stole the apple. Because I’m not naturally a thief. In fact, that apple is the only thing I’ve ever taken in my whole life that wasn’t mine.

Okay, maybe the second.

THE SHOPPING AREA CLOSEST
to my house is a place with fountains, gazebos, and park benches called the Village at Canterbury Commons. I used to be sarcastic about the name, but now I’ve faced the fact that I’m paying good money to be near all this simulated charm, and besides, the center has everything I need. A ridiculously upscale grocery, a Starbucks, a Walgreens, a ballroom dance studio, a day spa, a branch of the library, and the holy trinity of takeout: Chinese, Mexican, and Italian.

The grocery is almost aggressively dark and cool inside, and it’s designed to emulate a medieval hill town on market day. There are slate tiles beneath my feet and rough wooden beams over my head and there are trees, live trees, clustered in the corners. The aisles are deliberately crooked, to make them seem all the more like winding streets, with nooks and random alleyways, as if you’re lost somewhere in Italy. The stock boys look like waiters in their black double-breasted tunics and they whisk by with sample trays bearing jams and cheeses and dark chocolate dusted with kosher salt. I’ve come here often in the last year, despite the expense, because they make up so many individual salads and put them in the coolers. It’s an easy place to shop for one.

In the seafood grotto they’ve piped in the sound of crashing waves. They’re overdoing it, trying too hard, the way people always do when they’re faking. I select a single piece of tuna, which the man behind the counter wraps in brown paper and ties with a string. It’s like an old-fashioned gift, the kind of tuna Julie Andrews would sing about. I have my quinoa salad and my bottle of pinot gris and all I need now is a piece of fruit for dessert. The produce section holds the true masterpieces of the store—strange fruits with strange names. Jujube. Mamey sapote. Rambutan. Horned melons. They tumble artfully across burlap sacks, reminding you that they’re fresh off a dock somewhere, and the displays are carefully lighted, with the shadows planned to fall a particular way, to tempt the eye in a certain direction.

Despite the bounty—or maybe because of it—I’m not a good shopper. I buy the same stuff over and over, because otherwise I become paralyzed with possibility. Take this pyramid of artichokes, with their leaves curled around each other, all green and purple and plump, arranged in perfect symmetry, protecting the edible heart. I could reach for one. I could carry it back to my kitchen, but when I got there I wouldn’t know how to cook it. I’ve seen them roasted on a grill but I’ve never understood exactly what that entails. I suppose I could put it in a pot and steam it, but how long does that take and if you overcook it, don’t you risk turning everything brown and mushy? Besides, at some point in the process you must take scissors and snip off all the thorns and I’m not sure how to do that either, and then there are these key limes which are as small as olives and an ugly yellow color. I know this means they’re the good ones, the real key limes and not the engineered clones, but how many of them would it take to make a pie?

The phone in my purse vibrates and I look down. Hospice again. I’ll have to call them back, but maybe not today, when all I want is to go home. The library books in my tote bag were each chosen because the blurbs on the back promised happy endings. No kidnapped children or exploding car bombs or emerging family secrets. And at the last minute I threw in a Jane Austen—sweet Jane Austen, who never fails to fix it all by the last page, who marries off her heroines to the only men in England who value a woman’s character over family fortune, the only men in the world who have ever valued intellect over beauty. I’ll go home and read and eat my tuna and drink my wine and deal with hospice tomorrow.

There’s a little girl sitting in the buggy beside me, kicking her chubby legs. She’s holding a pink and gold fruit in her hands like a ball. A guava, I think it must be, or is it a papaya? I grab something from the nearest stand. My hand comes back with an apple, but an apple is good enough, and I feel suddenly exhausted, suddenly teary, and I’m relieved when the phone stops ringing. I can’t face death right now. I can’t even face a guava.

I pay and leave, loaded down with the books, the wine, and the groceries. The surprising weight of a single woman’s Friday night. It’s hot out here on the street, way too hot for the black suit I’m wearing, but it was the only thing I owned that seemed appropriate for the lawyer’s office. Another wave of dizziness rises up in me. I never ate lunch, and there’s no telling what, if anything, I had for breakfast. I stop for a moment to shift the bags and take a bite of the apple, and it suddenly hits me that I didn’t pay for it. That I held this apple, this sad little apple, the whole time the checkout kid was scanning my groceries. How distracted must I be to not notice I had something in my hand even while I was sliding my credit card and approving the amount? Why didn’t the checker say something? I’ve never shoplifted in my whole life and I’ve turned to go back and pay when, from the dark recesses of my purse, my damn phone vibrates again, sending a jolt into my side like a cattle prod. I’m looking down and digging for it as I push open the door with my hip. Just when my hand finds the phone, it stops vibrating, and I look up.

I’m inside a large, bright room.

The walls are covered in mirrors and for a minute I see nothing but images of my own body, reflected back at me from every angle. The floor is wide and blank, like an ocean. There’s a rack in the corner crammed full of spangled dresses, a big oaken bar with stools, a sagging couch, and an enormous blinking sound system, the components awkwardly linked together with a visible snarl of cables and cords. Music is on. Sinatra.

This isn’t the grocery. I’ve managed to stumble into the dance studio beside the grocery. Canterbury Ballroom, I think they call the place, and I notice it, in a peripheral sort of way, when I go into the grocery every day. The studio has trophies in the window, like the kind they give children for soccer and karate, along with a group of framed pictures. Women in thick fake eyelashes with their hair slicked back, smiling these maniacal smiles as they wrap their arms around spray-tanned men in open shirts. I’ve always wondered how such a tacky place ended up in such a pricey part of town.

“Hello there,” a voice says, and a girl stands up from behind a desk. Her hair is one of those colors never seen in nature, somewhere between red and purple and brown, and the style is very severe, a china bowl cut with long bangs. “Did you come in about the free introductory lesson?”

“I don’t know why I’m here,” I say, and the girl nods patiently, as if something about me has already made that all too clear. As I step deeper into the room, I can see that two people are in the corner, dancing—or at least sort of dancing. An old woman is being steered in circles by a much younger man in a black T-shirt and black pants. He carefully matches his steps to hers, moving slowly, slightly off the beat. Two of a kind, Sinatra sings. Two of a kind.

“I’m Quinn,” the girl says, extending a hand. Her fingernails are short but the polish is the exact same color as her hair.

“I’m Kelly Madison. No . . . no. I mean I’m Kelly Wilder.” Apparently at some point in the course of this morning, I have decided to take back my maiden name.

Quinn nods again, as if she’s used to greeting people who don’t know their own names.

“This is embarrassing,” I say, “but I accidentally stole an apple from the grocery next door”—and here I shift the bag again and hold out the apple to prove my point—“and I was trying to go back to pay when my phone rang and I looked down and I ended up here . . .” It sounds even stupider when I say it out loud.

And Quinn nods yet again, with that same annoying yoga-girl exaggerated calm. “So you don’t want to dance?”

“Well, of course I do. Everyone wants to dance. I mean, someday I want to dance but right now I’m just trying to pay for my apple. Coming in here was an accident.”

“You know,” Quinn says, tilting her head, “I’ve never believed in accidents.”

“Neither have I,” I hear myself saying. And it’s true. I believe in a lot of things, but accidents are not among them.

“So you’re here for the free introductory lesson.”

“Evidently.”

Quinn turns and her hair moves as a perfect unit. “We have a few forms for you to fill out,” she says, walking behind the desk.

Forms? I almost bolt. An introductory lesson sounds harmless enough, but filling out forms is a commitment. Sinatra has finished and the man is heading toward the music system. He brushes by me as I duck my head and rummage through my purse for an ink pen. It’s impossible to write and hold the groceries, so I put them down on the couch and, after a moment, sit down myself. The form is pretty much what you’d expect—name, address, and contact info, including next of kin. In case the samba kills you, I guess.