Page 189 of Levi

Benji folds himself sideways across his husband’s lap with both arms around his neck, and Mickey wheels them in slow circles with Benji’s shoes hanging off the footplate. Nobody’s dry. Sheila’s got a new dish towel over her face again.

Mickey’s father is at the next table over from ours, where Sheila set him up with a plate and a sweet tea, his chair angled so he can see everything. The dementia took most of him a few years back, and it doesn’t hand any of it back once it’s got it. Some nights he doesn’t know the year. Some nights he doesn’t know the grown man in the wheelchair is the boy he raised. Tonight he’s somewhere back before all of it, and he seems comfortable there, and his wife stopped correcting him a long time ago on which decade he’s visiting. She just holds his hand on the tablecloth and goes where he goes.

But he watches the floor, and when Benji spins past in Mickey’s lap the old man leans over to me, and says, “That’s my boy. Fastest boy in Bay County.”

“Yes, sir,” I say. “He sure is.”

“Fast as hell,” he says, satisfied, and goes back to his tea.

When the song turns over, Benji goes and collects his mother, a small bright woman who’s spent the evening about three feet off her son. Then he leans down and takes Mickey’s mother’s hand and pulls her up off her chair at the next table, and he takes both women out onto the floor at once, one on each arm.

He spins the one and then the other, and the two mothers laugh at each other over the top of his head, and Mickey’s father claps along. Half a beat off, delighted, watching his wife dance with the pretty blond boy and not needing to know one thing past the fact that she’s happy.

Then Benji walks them both back to Mickey.

Mickey’s mother takes one of his hands. Benji’s mother takes the other. The two women stand on either side of the chair and hold on, and Benji sets a hand on each of their shoulders behind it, and not one of the four of them says anything, because there’s nothing that needs saying.

Mickey’s got one mother by blood and one by marriage as of sundown, and both of them have him now. The old man watches his wife hold the hand of his son in the wheelchair, and he smiles and claps one more time.

Then Dante stands up and holds his hand out to me.

“I don’t dance,” I tell him, taking it anyway.

“You do now.”

We go out under the lights. He puts a hand at the small of my back like he’s done it a thousand times, and we haven’t, not once. I’ve never danced with another man. He takes the weight of all that and leads me onto the floor.

“Your mother’s watching us,” I tell him.

“My mother’s been watching us since July.” He turns me easily. “She told me on the phone she loved you. She hadn’t even met you yet. She loved the idea and decided the rest was paperwork.”

“That where you get it?”

“Get what?”

“Deciding a thing’s done before anybody’s agreed to it.”

He smiles. “You agreed.”

I did.

The song’s an old one, slow, a record cut before I was born. Usually I’d have the title and the key and the year of it before the second line. Tonight I don’t reach for any of that. It’s just a song, his hand on my back, and the floor solid under both of us. It’s good.

Across the way Dante’s mother has stopped dancing to watch us. Both hands pressed over her mouth, tears running, the way she’s cried since the ceremony. She catches me seeing her and she doesn’t wave it off. She just nods at me, once, like something’s been settled, which in Dante’s family is how it gets done.

Then his sisters arrive. Mirta lifts my hand right off Dante’s shoulder and Clara already has Dante by both of his, and the four of us end up in a knot in the middle of the floor. I get handed back and forth between two women who have known me a week and dance with me like they raised me. Dante watches his sisters steal me and doesn’t lift a finger to save me.

“They kept you twenty minutes,” he says when Mirta finally trades me back.

“Felt like five.”

“Twenty. That’s a record. They gave Benji eleven his first year.” He turns me easy. “My mother’s already building Nochebuena around you.”

Sometime during the party Benji’s Aunt Lorraine goes to work.

Benji flew his family up from Miami, and the one everybody warned me about is the aunt. Benji spent a week of his planning trying to keep her three tables clear of anything in a uniform, because Lorraine at an open bar is a documented event. She’s in a sundress like every woman here, except Lorraine’s is cut down near to the county line, and Lorraine was not built to be overlooked in it.

Tonight the open bar produced a biker named Tank. Big fella, gray in the beard, a leather cut, a Roadhouse regular. Lorraine found him by the margarita machine an hour ago and hasn’t surfaced since.