This Very Moment by Rachel Ann Nunes

with her.
    He waved her back to the guests. “Go on and take care of them. I’ll talk to you later.”
    For Kylee, the greeting stage of the evening had never taken so long. She glanced often at Bill, sitting alone at his table. Once he put one of the yellow roses between his teeth and stretched out his arms first to one side and then the other as if he were dancing. Kylee laughed and wondered if he liked to dance. Her church was sponsoring a dance for singles in two weeks to celebrate Thanksgiving. That would be so much better than going to the smoke and booze filled dance halls. Maybe Bill would go with her.
     
    * * * * *
     
    When Kylee arrived at the table, Bill was telling the two couples who had joined him the details involved in a facelift. The lady next to Bill turned a pale shade of green. “I would never submit to that,” she said daintily. Her apparently much older husband patted her hand.
    “Oh, no?” Bill said. “Hmm. I guess it’s lucky for me that many people don’t feel that way.” He recognized the tiny, almost imperceptible marks on her face that most people would never see. Coupled with her aging hands, Bill judged that the woman had not only had plastic surgery once but possibly twice.
    The evening played out much as the benefit dinner two weeks before, and Bill noticed the donations were more generous than Kylee had said was customary for her second list. The commercials, it seemed, were doing their job.
    After the guests left, Kylee sat at the table with Bill, watching the waiters clean up around them. “I’m glad it’s over,” she confessed. “You know, I still get butterflies in my stomach when I first get up. It’s okay after I start talking, but before that I’m a wreck.”
    “It doesn’t show.”
    “That’s good.” As she spoke, she watched Elaina and Troy talking by the outside door, heads close together.
    “Is something wrong?” Bill asked. “You seem kind of far away.”
    Kylee turned her gaze back to him. “I’m just disappointed. Remember when I told you the surgeries were to begin on Monday? Well, apparently one of the surgeons had to reschedule, and then 60 Minutes wanted some time to follow the stories of all the children, so that delayed the rest of the surgeries as well.”
    “60 Minutes will get you some great publicity.”
    “I know, but I want to see the children get help now. Little Anna is going to look so great once her mouth is fixed.”
    “A bilateral cleft lip and complete cleft palate will require more than one surgery, you know. With a case as severe as hers, she’ll need to have further surgery as she matures. That’s not even including the hearing, breathing, and dental problems she has. Overall, there will be a lot more scarring than if she’d had the lip surgery as a baby.”
    “I know all that, but she’ll look good. I just know she will. Certainly a lot better than she does now. We already have a great dentist, Gerald Torgeson, who has volunteered to help with the dental work. And I’m sure other doctors will step forward to help in the other areas. I hate this delay.”
    Bill grabbed her arm. “Come on, what you need is to get away from this for a while.” He stood, pulling her up with him.
    “Do you like to dance?” Kylee asked suddenly.
    He gave her a pained expression. “Tonight?”
    “Ha! Even I can see that you can barely walk tonight, much less dance. But we’ll be having a dance at our church in a few weeks. It’s being held on the Friday after Thanksgiving.”
    “With preaching and baptism in the intermission?” he said with a smirk.
    Kylee punched the sore muscles in his arm, laughing as Bill winced. “Something like that. Of course we always have to smuggle in rock music, and there’ll be chaperones. We’ll have to dance an arm’s length apart.”
    “That’s crazy.”
    “While the chaperones are measuring the distance between us with hard little rulers and Bibles, and frisking us for rock music, we can talk