Pretending to Dance by Diane Chamberlain Page A

had a high school education and I had a PhD. We came from very different family and economic backgrounds. My parents and Trevor and Claudia discouraged the relationship from the start. But … well, you know her.” He smiled at me. “You know she has a sort of … magnetic personality.”
    I nodded. This was so weird, hearing him talk about a romance with someone other than my mother. My stomach felt knotted up and I pressed my hands together in my lap, but I’d asked for the story, and I didn’t want him to sanitize it for me even if it made me squirm.
    â€œI’d never known anyone like her,” Daddy said. “My family seemed so rigid … so uptight by comparison. It was as though I’d found someone I could finally relax around.”
    I knew what he meant. It seemed impossible to do anything that would shake Amalia up. She rolled with whatever came her way.
    â€œSo, anyway, we had fun together and I decided our differences didn’t matter. But then I began having trouble with my legs. Sometimes when I danced—or even walked—my legs felt leaden and it took extra effort to make them move. At first I thought it was my imagination. I had no idea what was wrong with me. I saw a doctor—well, several—and had too many tests to count, and eventually got the diagnosis of MS. I didn’t handle that diagnosis particularly well.” He smiled again, and I had the feeling he was understating what had happened.
    â€œWere you a basket case?” I asked.
    He laughed. “You could say that. And at first, Amalia was very supportive, but then she—quite suddenly—seemed to withdraw. And one day, she simply disappeared.”
    â€œDisappeared?”
    He nodded. “One night, she packed up all her things in her room at Highland Hospital and left without a word to anyone. I was…” He looked at the ceiling. “Well, I guess the word is devastated, ” he said, his eyes back on me. “I searched for her, but she had vanished, and I assumed the MS had scared her away. She couldn’t deal with it and couldn’t tell me to my face, so she simply left. It was too much for her.”
    I couldn’t imagine the Amalia I knew behaving so cowardly. “That was cruel.” I frowned.
    â€œIt did feel cruel at that moment,” he agreed. “But anyway, a couple of months after she left, I met Nora,” he said. “She’d been hired by the hospital as a pharmacist and we struck up a friendship. She wasn’t the least bit put off by the MS. As a matter of fact, she invented ways I could deal with my ever-increasing limitations and accompanied me to doctors’ appointments and came up with work-arounds so that I could still do things I wanted or needed to do.”
    â€œThat is so Mom.” I smiled.
    â€œShe was amazing. She was definitely a person you could count on, and I needed that. I fell in love with her, and of course my family adored her. She fit in much better with them, plus they were so relieved Amalia was gone.”
    â€œI still can’t believe Amalia deserted … Oh!” I suddenly got it. “Was she pregnant ?”
    â€œYou are one smart cookie,” Daddy said. “She certainly was. Of course, I had no clue. You can draw your own conclusions as to why she thought she needed to leave. Maybe she didn’t want to tie me down to someone my family disliked, or she was just plain scared. So your mom and I were married and then one day Amalia appeared on our doorstep with a baby—you. She was overwhelmed trying to care for you as a single parent. Your mom—Nora—was unable to have children.… I think you knew that?”
    I nodded.
    â€œAnd while I was disappointed about it, I thought maybe it was just as well, given the progression of the MS.” He looked out the window toward the trees again, then back at me with a smile. “But then you showed