The Unexpected Waltz Read Online Free Page A

the weird part of the day. After I left the law office I went to the grocery and somehow, I don’t know how, I ended up in the dance studio beside it and I signed up to take a lesson. So get out your calendar and circle the date in red. This is the day Kelly Wilder officially lost her mind.”
    “You’re going back to Wilder?”
    “The point is, I signed up to take a dance lesson.”
    “What’s weird about that? You always liked dancing.”
    “This isn’t club-style dancing. It’s ballroom, the sequins and spray-tan shit that comes on public access late at night.”
    “Ballroom’s hot,” Elyse says. “Everybody’s doing it.”
    “Exactly. I’m a cliché. And then, as if the lessons weren’t bad enough, I furthermore agreed to buy special shoes to do it in. They have really high heels and straps that wrap around your ankle and the soles are suede, and you can’t even wear them on the pavement, you have to carry them around in a little silk bag. Why would they make shoes you can’t walk in?”
    “Probably so you can slide your foot.”
    “What?”
    “Suede soles would make it easier to slide your foot. Dancing is a sport, so you need a sport-specific shoe.”
    “I hate it when you’re logical.” I take a gulp of the wine. “But I haven’t told you the strangest part of all yet,” I say. “All the lawyers were moving in unison, like zombies, and I got the feeling that one of the female lawyers was winking at me. Then when I was in the produce aisle at the grocery I got all flipped out about what kind of fruit to buy. There were so many choices and they were all so beautiful and there was a little girl holding a guava and for some reason the whole thing made me feel like crying and I ended up with an apple.”
    Elyse is silent. She waits.
    “They have a thousand kinds of fruit,” I say. “Glamorous exotic stuff, and I choose this scuffed-up little red apple like you can get at the BI-LO. And then—you’re going to love this part—I accidentally fucking steal it. I mean I hold it in my hand all the way through the checkout line and by the time I realize what I’ve done, I’m out on the street. You know me, what a nerd I am. I turn around to go back and pay and I accidentally wind up in a ballroom studio instead and then before you know it I’m agreeing to get suede-bottomed shoes and let some Russian who’s probably sprayed orange lead me around the dance floor for a million dollars an hour. I’ve become that woman, Elyse. You know—the old pathetic kind who pays men to fuss over them.”
    “Maybe the apple was enchanted.”
    I laugh, despite myself.
    “Well, you have to admit the whole thing’s pretty Disney-fied,” she says. “There’s a mysterious fortune, a number that cannot be uttered aloud. A stranger winks at you. You take a bite of an apple and boom, you’re pulled into the ballroom against your will. And now you’ve got to find some magic shoes that the minute you put them on will make you start to dance.”
    “They’re just a pair of fuck-me heels. Nobody said they were magic.”
    “Personally, I blame Cinderella,” Elyse breezes on, and across two thousand miles I hear her fork clank against her plate. “Or maybe Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. Between those two, there isn’t a woman alive in America today who doesn’t think her whole life would be transformed if she could just find the right pair of shoes.”
    “What’d you make tonight?”
    “Tuna too,” she says, laughing softly.
    Elyse and I like eating together. North Carolina and Arizona are in different time zones but I eat late and she eats early, so it isn’t an issue. I always sit in the chair that faces the setting sun and sometimes I wonder if she sits facing east. She knows I need these little rituals, that I’m not yet accustomed to having dinner alone and maybe never will be. I imagine her out on her adobe patio, her hair tied in a loose knot at the back of her neck, squinting like a French film