The Unexpected Waltz Read Online Free Page B

star. Living out west agrees with her. She seems taller since she moved there, rangy like a cowgirl, with a kind of elegant messiness. Elyse doesn’t bother with Botox or Spanx or highlights to hide the gray. She doesn’t need to. For Elyse, pretty would be a step down.
    “I’m cracking up,” I say, surprising myself. For the second time today I feel like crying, but then again, I often cry when I drink.
    “Oh, Kelly, you’re not cracking up. You’re trying to act like it was an ordinary day, but it wasn’t. Settling the estate means the last link to Mark is broken, so of course you’re rattled. The dancing is a great idea. You can’t stay all boxed in and bunched up forever.”
    “I know, I know. It’s been a whole year.”
    She hesitates. “It’s been a lot longer than a year.”
    I sit up straight. It feels like she’s slapped me.
    “Mark wasn’t so bad,” I say. “It’s not like he could help getting sick.”
    “I didn’t mean Mark,” she says. There’s static on the line. She must have walked off the patio. She must be standing in the sand among the cacti, looking up at the mountains. “Are we ever going to talk about Daniel and what happened way back then? How he broke you?”
    For almost forty years, Elyse has been my witness. The sister I never had. The sister I never particularly wanted. The only person in my life who knows about not only Mark and Daniel but the man before that and the one before that. Whenever I left a job or a boyfriend or moved into a new apartment, she was right there, but I guess I counted on her to have the same selective amnesia I had. Because when you’re young and going straight from one mistake to another, you want your friends to remember only the things you want them to remember. You want them to say, “Yes, he’s the first. The first one who really matters. All those other times were just for practice. Here, in this moment, is where your real life begins.”
    Elyse has never been especially good at this. Her memory’s a damn bear trap and it’s never let go of Daniel. How like her to bring him up now, on this day when I’m already half-drunk and half-upset.
    “I didn’t realize I was broken,” I say. “Or at least I didn’t realize that’s how you saw me.”
    “I don’t. You know I don’t. Okay . . . no talk of Daniel. At least not yet. But have you ever noticed how when you lose one thing, your mind kind of circles back to everything else you ever lost? You break up with a guy and boom, it’s like all the guys you ever broke up with suddenly pull in your driveway and get out of the same car. Or you walk into a funeral home and you remember every other time you’ve ever been there and the next thing you know, five funerals are going down at once. You start crying and you don’t even know why, and people say ‘What’s wrong?’ and you say ‘Nothing,’ but you still keep crying. So I’m just saying that losing Mark might be like losing Daniel all over again.”
    “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I say, although of course I do. Elyse likes to point out obvious things in a really surprised tone of voice, like she’s single-handedly broken some great new philosophical ground. It’s one of the things about her that is simultaneously annoying and endearing.
    I carry my plate over to the rubber dish rack in the sink. It was hard to find this dish rack. Apparently they don’t sell many of them anymore—I had to go to Walmart and Target and then Sears. But I never seem to dirty enough dishes to bother running the dishwasher. I use the same coffee mug, wineglass, plate, and three utensils over and over, washing them, letting them dry in the rack, and then picking them back up again for the next meal. It’s ludicrous. A kitchen this size really belongs on the set of a Food Network show. Or it should at least be in the home of a woman who does more than open a prepackaged salad and put a piece of tuna on the grill. My bed looks