My Stepmother Sold the Farm, So I Married the Man Who Left novel · Chapter 11 of 32

Chapter 11: Polka Night

The Grange hall had a wooden dance floor and a tin ceiling, and it smelled of coffee and floor wax and the sweat of every wedding in the county since 1948.

Hilda wouldn't let us stay home.

"Husbands and wives dance at the Grange," she said, and pointed her car keys at me. "It's in the bylaws."

"It isn't in any bylaws."

"It is now. I'm the secretary."

So on Saturday night I stood at the edge of the dance floor in a green skirt and my good boots, with my braid pinned up.

The band was three old men with an accordion, a fiddle, and a drum kit with one cymbal.

They played the polka fast and without stopping.

Nels stood beside me in his clean shirt and looked at the dancers.

"I don't dance," he said.

"Hilda says you do."

"Hilda's husband taught me in the barn when I was fifteen. I was drunk on his hard cider, and I haven't done it since," Nels said.

"Then you're overdue."

"Sol."

"People are watching," I said. "Delores is at the second table. She's been watching you for ten minutes."

He glanced, and his jaw set.

"All right," Nels said, and held out his bandaged hand, and I took it.

He led me onto the floor between a couple in their eighties and a man in suspenders swinging a girl in the air.

His left hand settled on my waist, and then lower, at the small of my back.

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