The Winter of Her Discontent by Kathryn Miller Haines Page A

back into the office, and closed the door behind him.
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    Naturally, I was late to rehearsal. Instead of reprimanding me, Maureen greeted my return as an inconvenience she hadn’t anticipated having to deal with. She’d assumed I was smart enough to stay away for good. “Leg all better?”
    â€œGood as new,” I said, which would’ve been true if good meant painful and inflexible.
    â€œUnd yet you are late.” She clucked her tongue and rested both hands atop her walking stick. The other dancers were already assembled in their lines. There was no gap made to represent where I would be standing. Delbert had been grouped into a trio with another guy and gal and was doing his best not to make eye contact with me.
    Maureen offered me the kind of smile she usually reserved for Hansel and Gretel when they visited her candy house. “Perhaps you should sit zings out to catch up.” It wasn’t a question; it was an order and one that I gladly took. The pianist began a piece I wasn’t familiar with, which meant that after I’d left rehearsal the day before, the group had progressed enough to learn something new. It turned out Maureen had done me an immense kindness. While I rested in relative comfort on a folding chair, the dancers performed a militaristic combination of steps that I wouldn’t have been able to duplicate if I’d had a hundred hours of rehearsal. They leaped, bent, whirled, and flew with the perfect grace and timing of a pack of starlings on the last day of fall. Despite this apparent flawlessness, when they finished, Maureen sighed and tapped her cane in time to her chant of “Nein, nein, nein!”
    I would’ve been crushed, but the dancers accepted this reprimand and, on her command, repeated the piece, somehow making everything bigger, faster, tighter, and more cohesive. To this victory of movement Maureen sighed and announced, “Ve vill vork on it later. For now ve move on.”
    She reconfigured everybody for the next piece, sending half of the pairs to one side of the room, the other half to the other. When it was apparent she’d forgotten she still had me to contend with, I faked a cough to get her attention. “Oh, you,” she said. “Go stand vith Delbert. In the back.”
    It was a rough morning. My knee didn’t like being jarred, my ego didn’t like being pummeled, and gravity insisted on raising her ugly head at every opportunity. Maureen, mercifully, directed little of her criticism my way, not because I was improving but because she was smart enough to know not to kick a gal when she was down. Where was the fun in that?
    After lunch, we resumed our positions for the latest combination and with renewed vigor attempted to not disappoint Maureen. We were doing good—me included—until Luke Piccolo, a trollish man with a lazy eye, attempted to lift his partner above his head. Before his elbows reached his ears, he slipped, sending his partner, Lily, belly first onto the wooden floor. We all backed away in shock, waiting for a sign that she was still alive. A moan was our only confirmation.
    â€œCan you stand?” Maureen asked for the second time in as many days. Lily pushed herself into a kneel and gratefully latched onto Maureen’s arm for support. Slowly she rose, her face making it clear that every ounce of her was in pain. While Luke murmured excuses that ranged from Lily’s weight to the poor construction of his ballet slippers, I stared at the floor, grateful it wasn’t me that had fallen. A few feet from the scene of the crime was a particularly shiny patch of floor. I ran my ballet slipper through it to confirm what I suspected: the floor was slick enough to trip a rhino. And I was willing to bet that if I put my shoe to my nose, I’d be fighting the temptation to wipe what I found on a piece of toast.
    With Lily out of commission, Maureen called it a day. Jayne offered to split