Done in Fifteen Years novel · Chapter 24 of 32

Chapter 24: The River Dance

"No," I said. "It's not true."

"Then what is it?"

I looked at my mama's recipe box on the shelf over the cutting board.

"Be in the front row on Labor Day," I said. "And don't let him sign anything before I get there."

She was quiet.

"I don't take instructions from the other side of a deal, Mrs. Shuford."

"I'm not on a side of your deal. I'm the brisket."

I heard her pen click twice.

"I'm always in the front row," she said, and hung up.

Macey was watching me from the doorway with her arms crossed.

"Nine thousand dollars," she said. "Three weeks. We can't sell nine thousand dollars of extra brisket. I did the math. We'd need a third pit and a fourth twin."

"Then what do we do?"

She looked past me, out at the long dark hall.

At the pale oval in the middle of the floor.

"Mom," she said. "It's a dance hall."

Vernie gave her orders the next morning, from the phone at the rehab floor in Uvalde.

"Saturday the twenty-ninth. A real dance. Ten dollars at the door, twenty for anybody from Cypress Flat, fifty for anybody named Kilgore."

"Vernie, nobody named Kilgore is coming."

"Then it costs them nothing to stay home." She coughed. "Get the fiddler. Get his whole band, if they're still alive. And Raylene."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Wear the turquoise. It's the only dress in that closet that's ever been to a benefit."

Macey made the flyers on the back of menus.

She posted one on her video account, the one that had played in the church fellowship hall.

By Wednesday it had been shared four thousand times.

By Saturday at eight, the trucks were parked down the gravel road all the way to the highway.

The river people came first, in their good boots.

The tubers came back with their parents.

Two waitresses from the Kerrville store came, and a dishwasher from the flagship, and the cashier from the Boerne location, all in their own clothes.

The old man who'd sold Kilgore's its first post oak came in a bolo tie.

The high school football coach brought half his team to park cars.

Half of Cypress Flat came down that gravel road, and paid twenty dollars each, and looked around the old hall like they'd never seen a building before.

The fiddler's band was four men with a combined age of three hundred.

They played.

I worked the pits until nine in my jeans.

Then Macey came out back and took the tongs out of my hand.

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