Chapter 6: Late Show

I went back to the late show on Thursday.

Nobody asked me to, and nobody had said I could not.

I told Declan at breakfast, through the open kitchen doorway, standing at the toaster.

"I'm dancing tonight."

He was at the counter with his coffee and his back to me.

"The stage is yours," Declan said. "The building's mine. Do you want it closed?"

"No," I said.

"Then I'll have a car at the service door at midnight. You can send it away."

"I'll take the bus," I said.

"Then it will follow the bus," he said.

I almost laughed.

It was the first time since the third of November that I had almost laughed, and I did not know where it came from.

The dressing room had not changed.

The same long mirror with the bulbs, the same smell of hairspray and old velvet, the same cracked lipstick tray.

The other dancers stopped talking when I came in.

There were six of them.

I had worked beside them for years.

We had shared cigarettes and rent worries and a hundred nights of cold pizza at four in the morning.

Not one of them said a word.

Then the oldest of them put her cigarette out and crossed the room.

She had danced at the Starlite since before I was born.

She put her arms around me, hard, and held on.

"Whatever you did," she said into my hair, "we heard how you did it."

"I didn't do anything," I said.

"You walked out in front of Augie Farina with your head up, honey," she said. "I'd call that something."

I held on to her too long, and then I let go.

I sat at the mirror and did my eyes, and my hands were steady.

I checked the dressing room door three times before the show.

It had a bolt on the inside, and I slid it, and I tried it, and I slid it back.

The woman at the next mirror watched me do it and said nothing.

At the half-hour call I passed the office at the end of the hall.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Sold to the Man Who Took Me, but I Hold His Life from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.