Page 85 of Stay this Christmas
She started dancing along with everyone else, nodding and encouraging me to follow. I wouldn’t say I rocked line dancing, but that song was decidedly less awful than the others had been. Grinning the whole time, I managed most of the steps I knew and fudged my way through the ones I didn’t.
Looking to my other side, Sam gave me a thumbs up. “You’re on fire.”
I was no such thing, but by the time the song ended, I was sweating like I was. My dancing coach cheered the end of the song and gave me a double high five.
“I need a break. Do you want to come to our table?”
“Sure.” I beckoned to Sam, and we followed her to the far end of the bar.
Chairs had been piled with purses and jackets, and pitchers of beer littered the table tops. The woman sank onto a bench seat, exhaling loudly. She pushed her dark, sweaty hair out of her face and grinned.
“Do you want a beer? There’s water here, too, if you want.”
“I don’t think beer will help my coordination.”
“Probably a good call.”
She poured waters and passed them around. After stumbling my way through several songs, cool water had never tasted so good.
“I’m Callie,” she said. “I probably should have said that before.”
She held out a hand, and Sam and I made our own introductions.
“Thank you for helping me out there,” I said. “I would never have caught on without you.”
She waved a hand in the air. “Now that you have the basic steps, you’ll pick it up, easy. It took me a couple of visits before I got the hang of things.”
“Have you been coming here for a while?”
“About a year.” She gestured to the cluster of gray-haired women shaking their stuff. “My granny and her friends come every week, but I can’t keep up with them, so I just come every month or two. How sad is that? I’m twenty-four, and I can’t keep up with my grandma on the dance floor.”
Callie broke into nervous laughter that dissolved into a cringe. I looked over at Sam, who raised an eyebrow. Honestly hadn’t expected to find a kindred spirit tonight in the honky tonk.
“Granny blames it on my job as a kindergarten teacher,” Callie went on. “She thinks I’ve forgotten what it’s like to socialize with people who aren’t five years old, so she drags me out to places like this to show me what it’s like to really live or something. She’s always signing us up for new classes and springing crazy activities on me. Last month, we learned how to macramé. The month before that, it was a class on how to maintain a vehicle. It’s like she’s afraid I’m going to miss out on a social life if she doesn’t hold my hand through it.”
She took a breath, paused, then a big smile broke over her face. “Sorry, I’m babbling.”
“Not at all. Actually, I work at a retirement community, and I think I’ve forgotten what it’s like to socialize with people who aren’tseventy-five years old.”
“Hazards of our jobs, I guess. The other day, I was in the grocery store, and I knelt down and tied a man’s shoelaces for him. Mind you, I didn’t know the man, and his wife looked like she wanted to take the can of beans she was holding upside my head.”
“Last week, I thought to myself that yoga might be too hard on my joints.”
“Your joints were safe with me,” Sam teased.
“Doesn’t mean the thought was normal.”
“If you’re trying to avoid socializing with people over seventy-five, better stay away from my granny and her friends.” Callie nodded past me to the dance floor.
Laughing, I turned to watch the group of women shake their stuff. They did the grapevine and slid their boots, stepping and kicking right in time with everyone else. Their laughter and joy in the moment was obvious, four friends living it up and enjoying each other’s company. I hadn’t been that way with a group of girls since college. I loved my sisters, but it’d be nice to have a friend group, too.
I turned back to Callie, who watched her grandma’s antics with affection in her eyes.
“Would you like to have lunch with me sometime?” I asked.
Her mouth dropped open in surprise. Maybe I’d jumped the gun. I suddenly felt like a little kid on a playground, trying to strike up a friendship based on mutual love of the swing set.
“I know it’s kind of weird, but I don’t have a ton of girlfriends, and—”
