The song ended, the growling sax fading off into that rock n roll eternity our young DJ was pleased to call the grooveyard, and we started to walk off the floor.

“God, that was fun,” she said. She took my arm and squeezed it. “You’re fun.” Before I could answer, Donald blared out through the PA. “In honor of two chaperones who can actually dance—a first in the history of our school—here’s a blast from the past, gone from the charts but not from our hearts, a platter that matters, straight from my own daddy-o’s record collection, which he doesn’t know I brought and if any of you cool cats tell him, I’m in trouble. Dig it, all you steady rockers, this is how they did it when Mr. A. and Miz D. were in high school!” They all turned to look at us, and . . . well . . .

You know how, when you’re out at night and you see the edge of a cloud light up a bright gold, you know the moon is going to come out in a second or two? That was the feeling I had right then, standing among the gently swaying crepe streamers in the Denholm gymnasium. I knew what he was going to play, I knew we were going to dance to it, and I knew how we were going to dance.

Then it came, that smooth brass intro:

Bah-dah-dah . . . bah-dah-da-dee-dum . . .

Glenn Miller. “In the Mood.”

Sadie reached behind her and pulled the elastic, releasing the ponytail. She was still laughing and beginning to hip-sway just a little bit. Her hair slipped smoothly from one shoulder to the other.

“Can you swing?” Raising my voice to be heard over the music. Knowing she could.

Knowing she would.

“Do you mean like the Lindy Hop?” she asked.

“That’s what I mean.”

“Well . . .”

“Go, Miz Dunhill,” one of the girls said. “We want to see it.” And two of her friends pushed Sadie toward me.

She hesitated. I did another spin and held out my hands. The kids cheered as we moved out on the floor. They gave us room. I pulled her toward me, and after the smallest of hesitations, she spun first to the left and then to the right, the A-line of the jumper she was wearing giving her just enough room to cross her feet as she went. It was the Lindy variation Richie-from-the-ditchie and Bevvie-from-the-levee had been learning that day in the fall of 1958. It was the Hellzapoppin. Of course it was. Because the past harmonizes.

I brought her to me by our clasped hands, then let her go back. We separated. Then, like people who had practiced these moves for months (possibly to a slowed-down record in a deserted picnic area), we bent and kicked, first to the left and then to the right. The kids laughed and cheered.

They had formed a clapping circle around us in the middle of the polished floor.

We came together and she twirled like a hopped-up ballerina beneath our linked hands.

Now you squeeze to tell me left or right.

The light squeeze came on my right hand, as if the thought had summoned it, and she whirled back like a propeller, her hair flying out in a fan that gleamed first red, then blue in the lights. I heard several girls gasp. I caught her and went down on one heel with her bent over my arm, hoping like hell that I wouldn’t pop my knee. I didn’t.

I came up. She came with me. She went out, then came back into my arms. We danced under the lights.

Dancing is life.

7

The hop ended at eleven, but I didn’t turn the Sunliner into Sadie’s driveway until quarter past midnight on Sunday morning. One of the things nobody tells you about the glamorous job of chaperoning teenage dances is that the shaps are the ones who have to make sure everything’s picked up and locked away once the music ends.

Neither of us said much on the way back. Although Donald played several other tempting big-band jump tunes and the kids pestered us to swing-dance again, we declined. Once was memorable; twice would have been indelible. Maybe not such a good thing in a small town. For me, it already was indelible. I couldn’t stop thinking about the feel of her in my arms or her quick breath on my face.

I cut the engine and turned to her. Now she’ll say “Thank you for bailing me out” or

“Thanks for a lovely evening,” and that’ll be that.

But she didn’t say either of those things. She didn’t say anything. She just looked at me. Hair on her shoulders. Top two buttons of the man’s Oxford-cloth shirt beneath the jumper undone.

Earrings gleaming. Then we were together, first fumbling, then holding on tight. It was kissing, but it was more than kissing. It was like eating when you’ve been hungry or drinking when you’ve been thirsty. I could smell her perfume and her clean sweat under the perfume and I could taste tobacco, faint but still pungent, on her lips and tongue. Her fingers slipped through my hair (one pinky tickling for just a moment in the cup of my ear and making me shiver), then locked at the back of my neck. Her thumbs were moving, moving. Stroking bare skin at the nape that once, in another life, would have been covered by hair. I slipped my hand first beneath and then around the fullness of her breast and she murmured, “Oh, thank you, I thought I was going to fall.”

“My pleasure,” I said, and squeezed gently.

We necked for maybe five minutes, breathing harder as the caresses grew bolder. The windshield of my Ford steamed up. Then she pushed me away and I saw her cheeks were wet. When in God’s name had she started to cry?

“George, I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t. I’m too scared.” Her jumper was in her lap, revealing her garters, the hem of her slip, the lacy froth of her panties. She pulled the skirt down to her knees.

I guessed it was being married, and even if the marriage was busted, it still mattered—this was the mid-twentieth century, not the early twenty-first. Or maybe it was the neighbors. The houses looked dark and fast asleep, but you couldn’t tell for sure, and in small towns, new preachers and new teachers are always interesting topics of conversation. It turned out I was wrong on both counts, but there was no way I could have known.

“Sadie, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. I’m not—”

“You don’t understand. It’s not that I don’t want to. That’s not why I’m scared. It’s because I never have.”

Before I could say anything else, she was out of the car and running for the house, fumbling in her purse for her key. She didn’t look back.

8

I got home at twenty to one, walking from the garage to the house in my own version of the Blue-Balls Scuttle. I had no more than turned on the kitchen light when the phone began to ring.

1961 is forty years from caller ID, but only one person would be calling me at such an hour, and after such a night.

“George? It’s me.” She sounded composed, but her voice was thick. She had been crying.