Chapter 10: The Dance

"Who was on the phone?" Cooper asked on the drive home from the coast.

He asked it lightly, with his feet on the dashboard.

"Hm?"

"Last night. On the porch. I heard you."

"Lester's lawyer." Jonas kept his eyes on the road. "He's trying to move the board vote up. I told him not until I get back from Atlanta."

It was close enough to the truth to be believable and far enough to be a lie.

Cooper let it ride.

Item five on the napkin said: Slow-dance in front of the whole town, and don't let go.

The VFW hall held its dance on the second Saturday of every month, and it had since 1952.

Folding tables lined the walls, and a bluegrass band played in the corner.

About two hundred people from Albany stood around the floor in their church clothes with paper cups of punch.

Rudy had come as moral support, in a tie.

"You're sure about this," he said, in Cooper's ear.

"I'm sure."

"Because they'll talk," Rudy said.

"Rudy, I'm dying. I've never cared less what a town says in my life."

"Fair."

The band slid into something slow.

Cooper walked out into the center of the floor in the white shirt Jonas had pressed for him that afternoon.

He turned.

Jonas stood at the edge of the crowd in a dark suit with his scarred eyebrow and his careful hands.

He was looking only at Cooper.

Cooper held out a hand.

The whole room watched Jonas Brannen cross the floor and take it.

He was the Deacon's son, he sang in the choir on Sundays, and nobody had ever seen him touch another man in public.

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