The folder was bound in a pale green cover with the seal of Lee County stamped in the corner, and my hands were steady as I opened it. Three hundred parents sat in the dark of the Barbara B. Mann Hall with programs in their laps and sequined girls peeking from the wings, and I could feel the entire room leaning forward. “The first page,” I read, “is a warranty deed. The building at 2100 McGregor Boulevard, with all fixtures, was conveyed in 1971 to Dorothy Ann Lamar, and has never been sold, transferred, or leased since.” I looked up at Jessica. “That is me. I own the building, honey. I always have.”
The smile of Jessica went on cracking until there was only the shell of it. She held her bouquet upside down, the roses dripping petals. “Dottie, this is not the place,” she said, in a bright strained whisper. “Let us talk about this backstage.” “I would be glad to,” I said. “But I think the mothers might like to hear it first. Some of them paid the tuition.” A murmur rose from the dark. I turned the page. “The second document is a bank form. The studio account was redirected in February. The signature says Dorothy Lamar. Do you know where I was on the twelfth of February, Jessica?” “I do not.” “In a hospital bed with a tube in my arm.”
Kevin was standing in the front row. I saw him clearly, because he had risen with his hands half out in front of him, the way a man stands when he cannot decide whether to run. “Mom,” he said, “I thought you wanted to retire. Jessica said you were tired. She said you wanted me to set it up.” “Kevin,” I said, gently, “did you read what you signed?” He opened his mouth, closed it, and looked at the floor. A woman in the audience whispered, “Oh, Kevin.” It is a terrible thing to hear your own son identified in the dark by the tone of a stranger.
A retirement plaque on a recital stage turned into a county folder, a roomful of mothers, and one more shuffle ball change.
Arlene stood up in row three. She is eighty one, stooped, a retired bookkeeper in a plum dress with two heavy ledgers in her arms, and she has never been nervous of a crowd. “Fourteen thousand a month for three months,” she said, in a clear dry voice. “Forty two thousand dollars. I have the bank statements. Parents, your tuition for February, March, and April went straight to an account at Gulf Coast Credit in the name of Jessica Hart. Dottie never saw a cent.” A father in the second row said a word I will not repeat. A mother put her hand over her mouth. Several began to rise.
Jessica crumpled. I have seen a thousand girls cry in my studio, over bad turns and lost shoes and broken hearts, and I know the real thing when I see it. “I thought you were not coming back,” she said. “The doctors told Kevin that it was your heart. I thought you would never teach again. I thought the girls would be lost without someone, and I wanted to take care of them.” She sobbed. “I did not mean to take it. I only meant to hold it. And then there were bills, and a car payment, and it was so easy.”
I put the folder on the stage floor. I stepped to the front, in my good black dress, with the microphone in my hand, and I looked at the faces. Half of them were women I had taught at nine years old. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I said, “tonight is a recital. There are forty two little girls backstage who have worked since September, and every one of them deserves to dance. Nobody is leaving. Nobody is calling the police in this hall. We will have a conversation tomorrow, in my office, with Arlene, and we will figure out what is fair.” I turned to Jessica. “Honey, go sit down.”
The terms came together by Friday. Jessica returned thirty eight thousand dollars out of her savings, with the rest to follow in installments, and resigned in writing. She agreed to leave the area for a year. Kevin, who had cried for most of the week, offered to repay the remainder from his own salary, and I accepted. The studio sign came down, and the old one went back up on Monday, Miss Dottie Dance Academy, the paint a little chipped. The mothers formed a committee, and a woman named Carol brought coffee and baked goods every morning for a month.
I have not told you what happened at the end of that recital, because it is the part I am proudest of. The girls danced. They danced the finale, in gold sequins, forty two of them in two perfect rows, to a tune that every person in Fort Myers knows, and in the middle of the second chorus the oldest of them, a girl of seventeen named Marisol, put out her hand to me in the wings. “Miss Dottie,” she whispered. “Please.” I had not tapped on a stage in nine years. I took off my flat shoes and put on a pair of tap shoes that Marisol had slipped into my hand.
I walked out under the lights. The audience gasped. I do not remember deciding to do it. My body remembered. Shuffle, ball, change. Shuffle, ball, change. My knees ached, and my heart, with its two new stents, thumped bravely. The girls opened a space for me in the center of their two rows, and I danced there, seventy nine years old, in a black dress, in the light, among my girls, with three hundred people on their feet. When the music stopped, the hall was so quiet that I could hear Marisol breathing. Then it exploded.
They put my photographs back in the hallway the following week. Fifty years of recitals, in their old frames, in order. Kevin hung them himself, on his knees with a level, for two whole days. He works the front desk now, on weekdays, and he has learned the names of all the mothers. The studio is full. On the last night of the spring term, a little girl of six in a pink leotard looked up at me and asked how long I had been dancing. “Since before your grandmother was born, sweet pea,” I said. And she said, “Will you show me the shuffle?”
