Chapter 2 • Square Dance

Chivalry, New Mexico 1990

Danny Chevalrae fell in love while sitting on his front porch, watching the burning embers that were the end of a long August night. That evening it had been the only thing to do he was any good at. Even though all the porches in town offered decent views of empty streets, front porch sitting was a lost art among people Danny’s age in Chivalry. It was Friday, and most of the high school seniors were more interested in driving their pickups to houses outside town with well stocked liquor cabinets. Danny didn’t have a truck, and he didn’t have money to burn getting bombed. He did have a front porch. He could imagine his father finishing with the supper dishes and hitching up his jeans to go outside and sit in the quiet dry heat with a beer. If that’d been a satisfactory summer night for his father then Danny guessed it was okay for him, too.

That evening the porch was a more interesting place than it’d been the night before, or in fact on any night Danny could remember. He sat on the fraying lawn chair which had occupied the same place in the back right hand corner of the stoop for so long the wood under it was a different color. Sometimes he thought if a person came running through the front door of the house at full speed it might swing open far and fast enough to shatter his kneecaps. He didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about it, though. No one did much running in New Mexico halfway through August.

Next to his lawn chair was an old swing. It stuck out most of the length of the porch, and was beginning to succumb to dry rot. If it swung at all it would bump into his chair and push it around with a scraping sound that made the back of his head tickle. That happened sometimes when the wind picked up, and if Danny was in the kitchen making himself dinner he would have to go outside and move the chair. He always moved it back when he wanted to sit. Tonight he was glad he had. Sprawled across the full length of the swing was Kara Lynn O’Connor, her body tanned as brown as sugar.

Danny didn’t go out with many girls, even in his dreams, but he knew a looker when he saw one. She’d moved all the way to California in the ninth grade. Since then she’d changed a great deal. Their mothers had been bridge partners and their families had always gotten together for picnics and Thanksgiving, but that hadn’t meant Kara Lynn would have anything to do with him. Now her grandmother was sick with Alzheimer’s and they’d come back to Chivalry to stay with her. The old woman lived in a trailer half a mile away. Danny’s mother had the house, and the house had enough extra rooms for an orphanage, so she’d invited Kara Lynn and her mother to stay with them. Danny’s mother offered to make up a bed for Kara Lynn’s grandmother too, but the poor woman was used to her trailer. The one time they tried to move her into a nursing home she forgot how the furniture was arranged in the living room and broke her hip falling over a coffee table. No one knew how much time the old woman had left. If they stayed for the rest of the summer Kara Lynn would be going to school with Danny.

On hot summer nights, looking out at the street with the glass of watery lemonade he made for himself was comfortable to Danny, even though nothing more exciting than a tumbleweed usually passed in front of the house after eight o’clock. That night, he caught himself glancing at Kara Lynn’s bare feet. The more he looked at them the less comfortable he felt. Every few minutes she would hum a little bit to herself. When she hummed she stopped painting her toes and wiggled them. Danny thought his toes were ugly, and he kept them hidden. Kara Lynn was using a color on hers that looked like it had come out of a candy store. He figured that meant she wanted them to be seen. She seemed so interested in what she was doing he couldn’t help being interested too.

The tops of Kara Lynn’s feet were as brown as her face. Blond hair fell to her shoulders. She wore the kind of overalls that ended in shorts, and because she had her legs drawn up in front of her, the denim front panel of the overalls hung loosely away from her chest. She had on a plain white T–shirt under the overalls, and Danny could see the lace pattern of her bra over the curves of her breasts. There were light sweat stains under her arms, and the dying sunlight and the orange streetlight just coming on at the corner mixed and shone on the perspiration collecting in the hollow of her throat.

“Haven’t you ever seen a girl paint her toes before?” she asked him, and her voice was so foreign to the night stillness of the porch that Danny didn’t answer her. For a moment he felt like saying something sharp back. The porch was his domain, and she could stay inside if she wanted. Then he felt like he should say something else, something more like the truth. That he guessed he’d seen girls paint their toes before, but this was the first time he’d felt like watching. By then the moment to speak had passed, and anything he said would’ve sounded wrong.

“You’re still a quiet one,” she said. “You were shy in school. Nothing to say to anyone, and you never combed your hair. At least you got that down.”

Danny took a big drink of lemonade, and then spit ice cubes back into the glass.

“That’s disgusting,” she said. “Don’t do that. I’ve been listening to you do that all night. Mom says we could be staying here for months. If I have to listen to you spit ice cubes back into your glass for even another night, I’m either going to kill you, kill myself, or smother Grandma with a pillow so we can go home.”

She paused and looked at him. He set the glass down on the porch next to his chair. He didn’t know what else to do.

“Is this all you do? I figured by now you’d have found yourself a shy girl to talk to,” she said. “Or do you still only talk to teachers?” She glared at him. “What?” she demanded. “Why are you looking at me like that? Don’t you like girls or something? Christ, say something already.”

Danny hadn’t realized he was staring at her in any particular way. “I can talk,” he said.

“Can you say anything to keep me from going out of my mind? What do you think about, sitting on the damned front porch all night long?”

What the hell, Danny thought. “I remember square dancing in the sixth grade,” he said. “We were in the same class in the sixth grade, remember? Twice a week we all went in a mass down to the gym. Actually, there was the girl’s gym and the guy’s gym, but sometimes they put us all together, like for square dancing. All the girls would go to one of the lines for the basketball courts, and all the boys would line up across from them.”

“And then they’d play those records,” Kara Lynn remembered. She relaxed her body back onto the porch swing. “Who could forget those stupid records? ‘Allemande left, allemande right, now do–se–do your partner.’ Everyone always said they hated square dancing. God, how we’d bitch when Mrs. Cooper said it was that time of year. Honestly, thinking back, it was really kind of fun. Better than running the track or doing push–ups anyway.”

Danny glanced over Kara Lynn’s body, feeling less wrong about it, as if her talking about herself gave him some sort of extra freedom. The fading daylight with its sliding shadows made his stomach feel tight and hot.

“When they made me walk down that line, I always felt like I was walking to my execution,” he said. “I always counted down the line. We all did. We all wanted to know who we were going to be paired with, even though there was nothing we could do about it.

“One day I counted down and saw I was going to be with you. I think that day I was actually looking forward to square dancing. I always got the moves wrong. By the time I figured them out they’d be giving us a whole new set to learn. But for some reason, I wanted to dance with you. You had on a white dress, and you were smiling and talking to all of your friends. I could imagine all the other guys, counting down, hoping to get you. But you were mine that day. I must have counted seven or eight times, just to make sure. I wanted everyone else to see us together. I wanted them to be jealous.”

Kara Lynn had one leg straight out in front of her and the other pulled up with her arms around it. Her denim shorts were rolled at the bottom, and the cuffs hung away from her legs. Danny could see the skin of her inner thigh, soft as a puppy’s ear. There was a shadowy line where her skin, the wooden porch swing, and the shorts all came together. He thought he might remember the symmetry of it forever.

“When the lines started to come around I lost sight of you,” Danny said. “I was so worried that I’d counted wrong, but then the boy in front of me was taking the hand of the girl in front of you.”

“They always made us hold hands,” she reminisced.

“I was trying to think what yours would feel like,” he said. “I wiped mine off on my pants because it was sweaty.” He paused. “There’s an expression people get when they have to do something they don’t want to do. Most everyone will try to put a brave face on it, but for a second you can’t help having a look in your eyes that shows everyone how you really feel.” Danny stopped and picked his glass off the wooden boards of the porch. He took a large drink of the lemonade, ice and all. Carefully, he spit the ice back into the glass, one cube at a time.

“This wasn’t like that,” he said. “You were talking with all your little girlfriends, and when you looked up and saw me, you got this look on your face like you’d just stepped in a warm pile of dog shit. You looked like you were about to cry. I can still see your face. And your hands. You put both of your hands behind your back.”

Kara Lynn stared at him. “Hell, Danny,” she said. She laughed so suddenly she nearly choked. “You were a pretty geeky kid. No one wanted to be your partner. I’m sorry if I was the one who made that clear to you.” She continued to laugh. It came out in giggles because she was trying to hold it in. “How can you remember that?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “I just do.” The truth was, he really did remember the way her face had looked. Sometimes when he was out, which wasn’t very often, he’d see a girl he wanted to talk to. Then Kara Lynn’s little girl’s face would flash into his mind, and he’d look away because seeing that expression again would end him.

“I guess it’s stupid,” he said.

Kara Lynn stopped laughing. She stared at him and grinned. “Come here for a second,” she said.

Danny didn’t move. He didn’t know what she meant.

“Come over here. Sit on the swing with me.” She reached out and grabbed his arm, pulling him over to the swing. He resisted for a moment, then let her draw him awkwardly across the small space. She turned on the swing to face him and crossed her legs Indian style.

“You know, most guys in this pissant little town would be trying to make their lives more interesting right now. They’d be trying to think how to get the pants off the girl from California. Especially the ones who don’t have anything to do but sit on their front porches.”

Kara Lynn leaned forward and took hold of Danny’s chin, pulling him to face her. Her hand moved quickly from his chin, and her fingertips sent a tingling swarm of bees gliding across his cheekbone to the side of his neck. He felt her fingers behind his head, in his hair. It was a quick movement, not even a caress. He could smell her skin over the arid desert air. It was a different scent, wet and dry, like the smell when it rained in the summer and the dust floated on the puddles of water down the streets beside the house.

Then she let him go and the swing lurched and popped on its chains. He heard the door open and slam shut. He was alone on the front porch again, but instead of staring out at Main Street, he was looking at the empty wooden slats of the porch swing, the place where Kara Lynn O’Connor had just been sitting.