Mindy Klasky - The Daddy Dance

But even as she berated herself, she remembered Rye’s easy smile. He’d been truly gallant, rescuing her at the train station. It had been mean of her to pretend not to remember him. Uncomfortably, she thought of the confused flash in his eyes, the tiny flicker of hurt that was almost immediately smothered beneath the blanket of his good nature.

And then, her belly did that funny thing again, that flutter that was part nervous anticipation, part unreasoning dread. The closest thing she could compare it to was the thrill of opening night, the excitement of standing in the wings while a new audience hummed in the theater’s red-velvet seats.

But she wasn’t in the theater. She was in Eden Falls.

And whether she wanted to or not, Kat was going to have to track down Rye Harmon the following day. Track him down, and retrieve her phone, and hope she had a better signal at Rachel’s house than she’d had at the station.

All things considered, though, she couldn’t get too upset about the lack of signal that she’d encountered. If she’d been able to call Susan or Amanda, then Rye would never have given her a ride. And those few minutes of talking with Rye Harmon had been the high point of her very long, very stressful, very exhausting first afternoon and evening in Eden Falls.

By noon the next day, Kat had decided that retrieving her cell phone was the least of her concerns.

Susan had swung by that morning, just after Kat had hustled a reluctant Jenny onto her school bus. Looking around the straightened house, Susan said, “It looks like you and Jenny were busy last night.”

“The place was a pigsty.”

“I’m sorry, dear. I just wasn’t able to get over here before you arrived, to clean things up.”

Kat immediately felt terrible for her judgmental tone. “I wasn’t criticizing you , Mama. I just can’t believe Rachel lives like that.”

Susan shook her head. Kat knew from long experience that her mother would never say anything directly critical about her other daughter. But sometimes Susan’s silences echoed with a thousand shades of meaning.

Pushing aside a lifetime of criticism about her sister, Kat said, “Thank you so much for bringing by that casserole. Jenny and I will really enjoy it tonight.”

Susan apologized again. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of giving you anything last night. The church ladies have been so helpful—they’ve kept our freezer stocked for months.”

“I’m glad you’ve had that type of support,” Kat said. And she was. She still couldn’t imagine any of her friends in New York cooking for a colleague in need. Certainly no one would organize food week after week. “How was Daddy last night? Did either of you get any sleep?”

Susan’s smile was brilliant, warming Kat from across the room. “Oh, yes, sweetheart. I had to wake him up once for his meds, but he fell back to sleep right away. It was the best night he’s had in months.”

Glancing around the living room, Kat swallowed a proud grin. She had been right to come down here. If one night could help Susan so much, what would an entire week accomplish?

Susan went on. “And it was a godsend, not fixing breakfast for Jenny before the sun was up. That elementary school bus comes so early, it’s a crime.”

Kat was accustomed to being awake well before the sun rose. She usually fit in ninety minutes on the treadmill in the company gym before she even thought about attending her first dance rehearsal of the day. Of course, with the walking boot, she hadn’t been able to indulge in the tension tamer of her typical exercise routine. She’d had to make due with a punishing regimen of crunches instead, alternating sets with modified planks and a series of leg lifts meant to keep her hamstrings as close to dancing strength as possible.

As for Jenny’s breakfast? It had been some hideous purple-and-green cereal, eaten dry, because there wasn’t any milk in the house. Kat had been willing to concede the point on cold cereal first thing in the morning, but she had silently vowed that the artificially dyed stuff would be out of the house by the time Jenny got home that afternoon. Whole-grain oats would be better for the little girl—and they wouldn’t stain the milk in Jenny’s bowl.

There’d be time enough to pick up some groceries that afternoon. For now, Kat knew her mother had another task in mind. “So, are you going to drop me off at the studio now?”

Susan looked worried. “It’s really too much for me to ask. I shouldn’t even have mentioned it when I called you, dear. I’m sure I can take care of everything in the next couple of weeks.”

“Don’t be silly,” Kat said. “I know Rachel was running things for you. She’s been gone for a while, though, and someone has to pick up the slack. I came to Eden Falls to help.”

Susan fussed some more, but she was already leading the way out to her car. It may have been ten years since Kat had lived in Eden Falls, but she knew the way to the Morehouse Dance Academy by heart. As a child, she had practically lived in her mother’s dance studio, from the moment she could pull on her first leotard.

The building was smaller than she remembered, though. It seemed lost in the sea of its huge parking lot. A broken window was covered over with a cardboard box, and a handful of yellowed newspapers rested against the door, like kindling.

Kat glanced at her mother’s pinched face, and she consciously coated her next words with a smile. “Don’t worry, Mama. It’ll just take a couple of hours to make sure everything is running smoothly. Go home and take care of Daddy. I’ll call Amanda to bring me back to Rachel’s.”

“Let me just come in with you …

Kat shook her head. Once her mother started in on straightening the studio, she’d stay all morning. Susan wasn’t the sort of woman to walk away from a project half-done. Even if she had a recuperating husband who needed her back at the house.

“I’ll be fine, Mama. I know this place like the back of my hand. And I’m sure Rachel left everything in good shape.”

Good shape. Right.

The roof was leaking in the main classroom, a slow drip that had curled up the ceiling tiles and stained one wall. Kat shuddered to think about the state of the warped hardwood floor. Both toilets were running in the public restroom, and the sinks were stained from dripping faucets. Kat ran the hot water for five minutes before she gave up on getting more than an icy trickle.

The damage wasn’t limited to the building. When Kat turned on the main computer, she heard a grinding sound, and the screen flashed blue before it died altogether. The telephone handset was sticky; a quick sniff confirmed that someone had handled it with maple syrup on their fingers.

In short, the dance studio was an absolute and complete mess.

Kat seethed. How could students be taking classes here? How could her parents’ hard-earned investment be ruined so quickly? What had Rachel done?

Muttering to herself, Kat started to sift through the papers on the desk in the small, paneled office. She found a printout of an electronic spreadsheet—at least the computer had been functional back in January.

The news on the spreadsheet, though, told a depressing story. Class sizes for the winter term had dwindled from their robust fall enrollment. Many of those payments had never been collected. Digging deeper, Kat found worse news—a dozen checks, dating back to September—had never been cashed. Search as she might, she could find no checks at all for the spring term; she couldn’t even find an enrollment list for the classes.

Susan had been absolutely clear, every time Kat talked to her: Rachel had shaped up. Rachel had run the dance studio for the past six months, ever since Mike’s diagnosis had thrown Susan’s life into utter disarray. Rachel had lined up teachers, had taken care of the books, had kept everything functioning like clockwork.