Page 14 of Canadian Boyfriend

In the beginning I’d cried a lot, which I guess should be embarrassing, but it had felt like a mechanical, almost automated response. It was aneasyresponse, as odd as that sounds. As if it wasn’t even being initiated or controlled by me. Your wife dies; you cry.

The hard part was after the crying phase.What comes next?That was the scary shit. I imagined it as looking into a black hole, or standing next to an abyss.

Worse even than the idea of teetering at the edge of the abyss was the idea thatImight be made of the same stuff. Of that same nothingness. Like there were these holes in me I had never noticed before, little pinprick-size voids made of black-hole material. If I stood long enough next to the abyss, I feared those pinpricks would somehow recognize the larger void as the same kind of entity and they’d sort of… ooze together.

And when you discover that you thought you were a regular person but no, you’re actually half-missing? You’re just a scaffolding where a whole person should be? That is some terrifying shit.

Then I found the pills.

The blister pack of tiny pills labeled with days of the week. A box with the prescription info on it. Reclipsen. Sarah’s name, our local pharmacy. “Refills: 6.”

At which point I stopped cleaning out Sarah’s stuff. I stopped letting Mom do any culling, either. I was afraid of what we might find, of what might be lurking beneath the surface of the life I thought I’d been living. Though I didn’t tell my mother that. I let her think my sudden reluctance was about not wanting to let go.

Which wasn’t a lie. Ididn’twant to let go. I’d had a vision of my life, my marriage, my future. Those pills, and the sleuthing I’d done later, told me that my vision had been a mirage.

I heard Olivia’s footsteps coming down the stairs—for a dancer, she did not tread lightly—which meant I had been standing in the mudroom for longer than I’d realized. Looking at Sarah’s shoes made me feel wobbly, like when you’re so hungry you get shaky. But there was no amount of food that could fill the voids I had inside me. Pinpricks sound small, but if there are a lot of them, they add up to an alarming amount of empty space.

All right, enough. I looked at the dog, and he gave me a sympathetic woof. I gathered the shoes and took them upstairs and dumped them in a box in my closet. Stowing the shoes in that box and closing the door to the closet made my chest feel like someone was stomping on it, and not in brightly colored canvas shoes but in something closer to the steel-toed boots I wore when chopping wood.

It was necessary, though. Aurora Evans was going to need a place to put her shoes.

4—VOCABULARY LESSONS

RORY

The next Tuesday, I got to the studio earlier than I needed to, because I wanted to talk to Gretchen about my new gig. On weekdays, there was a break between when the little-kid classes ended and when the after-school crews started rolling in.

“I probably should have talked to you first,” I said in conclusion. “It’s belatedly occurring to me that this might be a conflict of interest.”

Gretchen had seemed unfazed as she listened and Swiffered the floor. “How so?”

“Maybe I shouldn’t be getting into a side hustle with a student. Is that favoritism? Or perceived favoritism?”

“Hello, this is a suburban strip mall dance studio that was almost a pet groomer’s, not a presidential campaign.”

“I know, but what will the dance moms think?”

“Once again, I remind you that this is a suburban strip mall dance studio that was almost a pet groomer’s.” She used the handle of her Swiffer to point at “Miss Miller’s Morals,” a document the kids called “The Rules” that hung in an ornate gilt frame on the far wall of the studio.

I went over and perused it fondly. All these years later, I still loved looking at it.

Miss Miller’s Morals

Everybody is welcome at Miss Miller’s.

Everybody can dance.

Dancing is supposed to be fun.

The end.

“Miss Miller’s Morals” epitomized why I had taken this job. I had never imagined, after flaming out in New York, that I would set foot in a dance studio again. Dance had beaten me. I had conceded defeat, flown the white flag, total knockout.

But having struck up a friendly acquaintanceship with Gretchen at the Starbucks where I worked, which was near a high school where she’d been doing choreography for a student musical, I allowed myself to be wooed into her employ. I still worked at Starbucks, but I loved teaching—and I loved Gretchen. Like,lovedher. The night of our job interview, she lured me to her studio and showed me “Miss Miller’s Morals.” I looked at Gretchen in that moment, her impossibly blue Minnesota-Scandinavian eyes glinting with both passion and kindness, and I’m not saying it was love at (almost) first sight, but I’m not saying it wasn’t.

I used to try so hard with Emma, who had gone to the Newberg school with me. We’d roomed together—you know that saying about the devil you know? All those years of classes together in Minnesota, then in New York, and it was so mucheffort, like walking a high wire. With Gretchen, it was just… easy.

“I’m really glad you decided not to go the pet grooming route.” Gretchen shared my philosophy on dance. Well, no, Ilearnedmy philosophy of dance from Gretchen. She danced because she loved it, and she rejected a lot of what she called the culture of dance. I hadn’t realized a person could do that. But she also loved cats. To hear her tell it, she’d wanted to be her own boss, and she’d thought,What can I stand to do all day long?She’d narrowed it down to cats or dance and ultimately decided that clipping feline toenails was less appealing than wrangling roomfuls of waifs, though she sometimes said, usually when up to her eyeballs in recital tutus, “Maybe I made the wrong choice.”

---