Free The Art of Falling by Kathryn Craft

before turning back to our guests. “She’s not herself yet.” She took their coats, stowed the mat I’d been using in the closet, and pulled the coffee table back into position.
    “I apologize for not calling first,” Kandelbaum said. “Angela stopped in the bakery while I was closing, and driving up to look for you was sort of a spur-of-the-moment adventure. Did you know there are eight Sparrows in the Lehigh Valley phone book?”
    “I’m thrilled you’re here,” my mother said. “It’s been so gloomy.”
    “What do you expect from me, Mother?” I snapped. “I’m trying as hard as I can.”
    “I meant the winter weather, Penny.” She kept her voice light, as if we teased each other this way all the time.
    “We’ll try to be the sunshine Mother Nature has denied you,” Kandelbaum said.
    “Go on in and sit down,” my mother said. “I’ll get some snacks.”
    Angela, surveying the room, spied the dance posters in the hallway beyond. “Oh my gosh, this is like a museum. Look, Marty.”
    When Kandelbaum and I joined her, the flawless ballet bodies of Edward Villella, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Fernando Bujones, and Julio Bocca invited us down the hall. A museum—she was right. Each dancer on display, frozen in time, limited by frame, trapped behind glass. Each taunting the viewer with photographic perfection from a distant, untouchable place. Not one moment of messy, glorious, immediate movement to be experienced. It was the opposite of dance.
    “Were these all your partners?” Kandelbaum said.
    I chuckled. “In my mother’s fantasies, I suppose.”
    “Now, Penny,” my mother called, “they could have been, if they weren’t too old for you.”
    “Or too short,” I called back.
    It suddenly occurred to me—even after my exile from ballet, when my mother switched to buying the modern dance posters that hung in the next leg of the hallway, she only chose male choreographers: Paul Taylor, Mark Morris, Merce Cunningham. Why had she done this, in a discipline where females far outnumber the males? Where was Martha Graham, I wondered? Trisha Brown? Twyla Tharp?
    Neither Angela nor Kandelbaum mentioned the empty hook and the ghostly impression the missing poster had left on the wall near my bedroom door, but it haunted me.
    “This one’s different,” Angela said on the return trip, referencing the poster closest to the living room. “It really grips you.”
    “Rudolf Nureyev. In Petrushka . It’s my favorite as well. See the yellow marks here?” I pointed through the glass. “My mother rescued it from the door of my closet, where I’d taped him.”
    “His face is so expressive.”
    The role absorbed him: his lips parted and brows raised, hands bent at odd angles, and feet turned inward, he was a tragic doll whose soul struggles to emerge. “It’s like the photographer caught him in a moment of great potential—about to do something—and I never tire of trying to figure out what.”
    “Yes, that’s it,” Angela said. “I knew this place would be artsy before we rang the doorbell. We heard the piano—your playing was so moving. Heartbreaking, really.”
    I explained that my mother was the piano player.
    “Such talent in the family,” Kandelbaum said.
    My mother reappeared with a pitcher of grape juice, a plate of sugar cookies, and a glass bowl of cheddar Goldfish. She placed the tray on the coffee table. “Penny’s father bought me that piano the first year his sporting goods store turned a profit.”
    “And you never told me?”
    She shrugged, as if it were unimportant. She had to know I craved details about my father—and now she was coughing them up for people she’d just met? Even thirty years ago, a baby grand was a considerable investment, and one more clue to my father’s character.
    Angela and Kandelbaum took the overstuffed love seat beneath the front window. Kandelbaum popped a whole cookie into his mouth and grabbed a handful of crackers.
    It was hard to watch anyone