The Nice Girl Gets Even novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: Valentine's Day

I had six days to find two hundred thousand dollars.

Gussie had a plan for it, and the plan was punch.

By Valentine's night there were three hundred people on Government Street holding tickets.

They filled the ballroom and spilled out the doors onto the lawn.

The shrimper and the barber had strung lights through the live oaks.

The wedding-cake woman brought six sheet cakes and wouldn't take a dime.

The baker brought bread.

The bait-and-tackle man brought boiled shrimp, because you don't have a party without shrimp either.

I wore dark green velvet with a full skirt that swung when I turned, and low heels I could teach in all night.

I stood on the piano bench and clapped twice.

Three hundred grown people went quiet.

"Welcome to the Grown Folks' Cotillion," I said. "Nobody here can dance. That's the point. Find somebody you don't know and hold out your hand."

They did.

I taught them the waltz in the ballroom and Gussie taught the two-step on the grass.

Men who'd held beers at the edges of dance floors for forty years held on to strangers instead.

The bride from Daphne waltzed her fiance into the punch table.

Twice.

At nine, the shrimper's daughter came in from the lawn in a borrowed coat.

She was twenty-four, with her daddy's sunburned nose.

She stopped in the door when she saw him on the floor.

He held out his hand to her.

"Don't laugh," he said.

"Daddy, you can't dance."

"Hush and count."

I put on the waltz from Tuesday class.

He took her hand, and her back, and he led her once around my grandmother's floor without stepping on her once.

By the second turn she was crying.

By the third, so was he.

So was half of Mobile.

Gussie auctioned off her dance at ten.

The barber bid a thousand dollars.

The widower bid two.

They went back and forth until the barber threw up his hands at six.

The widower paid in cash from an envelope he'd been saving for a prom suit.

"I'll wear the old suit," he said. "She's worth it."

Gussie danced with him.

At one in the morning, the last car pulled away.

Gussie counted at the card table with her glasses on the end of her nose.

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