Page 7 of Not Our First Rodeo
“Can we talk about something else? Literallyanythingelse?” I finally ask.
She holds my gaze for so long that I think she’s not going to agree. “Fine.”
A relieved sigh breaks through my lips.
“Someone wants to buy the studio,” she says, and my breath catches in my throat, my heart stopping in my chest.
“What?”
She looks up from where she went back to flipping through papers on her desk. “You said you wanted to talk about something else.”
“Like the weather,” I sputter.
She rolls her eyes. “Wow, we got another shit ton of snow. What a huge surprise.”
“Someone wants to buy the studio?” I ask, voice shaky.
She nods, pulling up an email on her desktop. “An out-of-towner.”
That’s not that surprising, seeing as howsheis an out-of-towner. Tonya grew up in LA and then danced for a company in Boston until she retired. After she retired, she said she had no desire to see traffic or large groups of people ever again. Shelooked for the tiniest town she could find on a map, one that was in the middle of nowhere, and moved there.
It was Larkspur, Montana.
She’d been here for a few years by the time my parents started researching studios outside the metropolitan areas. They, too, wanted somewhere quieter. And when my mom saw that Tonya Ballard, a dancer she’d admired for years, had started a studio in a small mountain town in Montana, she told my dad that it was where we were moving.
The studio exploded over the years, drawing in locals and others who, like my parents, were looking for good dance studios in small towns. I’m not surprised it drew the attention of a buyer. It has before.
I am surprised that she’s bringing it up now.
“Are you considering selling?” I ask the question, unsure whether I truly want to know the answer.
Tonya fixes her gaze on mine. “I don’t know. I wasn’t, but traveling has its appeal.”
“Traveling,” I echo.
She shrugs. “Owning a business doesn’t allow for much of it, and I miss it. Plus, it would be nice to travel when it’s not for ballet and I can get drunk on wine and not worry about getting yelled at for it. I deserve to be fat and happy.”
My heart seizes in my chest, because on one hand, I agree with her. Traveling with a ballet company isn’treallytraveling. It’s working, which, as a dancer, means long hours of training and very little time enjoying yourself or the place you’re in. On the other hand, this studio has been the first thing to actually make me feel like I’m making progress on finding myself again, and Tonya is a huge part of that.
Losing her, losing this place, is something I’m not sure I can handle right now.
She watches me hawkishly, no doubt seeing every emotion I try desperately to keep hidden from my face.
“You know,” she says, leaning back in her chair. It squeaks loudly, but she ignores it. “You could always buy this place.”
I stare at her like she’s grown another head or suggested a six-year-old purchase her first pair of pointe shoes.
“You can’t be serious.”
She shrugs again, looking completely unbothered. “That would be the ideal situation. My star pupil, the apple of my eye, the daughter I never had, taking over my business.”
“I have no money,” I say.
She waves a dismissive hand. “That’s not an issue. You could make payments, get a loan, do whatever.”
“I have no qualifications.”
“You were a professional ballerina. You trained in this studio your entire life. You are a teacher here. How much more qualified do you need to be?”
