Free House of Dance by Beth Kephart Page B

navel, leaving a stripe of dark on my lavender T-shirt. Teresa was standing against the far wall. I lifted my eyes, at last, to Granddad’s.
    “Hello,” he said, because I hadn’t.
    “Hello,” I said.
    “Good to see you,” he said. “Rosie.” Putting my name out into the silence.
    I didn’t answer. I heard Teresa, who must have gone back into the kitchen. Teresa picking up dishes, rinsing things. The sound of spraying water. The tinkle of glass against glass. Teresa now humming.
    “Cat must have your tongue,” Granddad said.
    “Cat’s got her own tongue,” I mumbled, looking now at Riot, who had begun to give herself a fancy spa treatment. Her two back legs were stuck out at a ninety-degree angle. Her two front paws dabbed this way and that, maintaining her balance. “Where did you get Riot, anyway?” I asked finally, for the sake of saying something.
    “Your mom gave her to me,” he said, “when your grandmother passed. She was the runt of a litter. Needed some taking care of.”
    “Mom showed up with a cat one day?”
    “Cat in a basket,” he said. “If I remember. Your mother was pregnant with you at the time, so I guess that means you showed up too. She said, ‘We’ll both have our things now to be taking care of.’ She said taking care was a cure, I remember.” His eyes got misty at the end of his tale.
    “Makes Riot a pretty old cat,” I said, to distract him.
    Riot went on bathing, oblivious. We watched her antics as if she were some kind of show, I standing with my arms tied tightly across my chest, Granddad in his metal bed, his face so pale in the shaft of sun that had worked its way inside. Teresa had turned the water off. There was stillness now on her side of the wall. Stillness everywhere.
    “You got a new bed,” I said.
    “Feel like a Jetson,” he said.
    “It shines,” I told him, because who knows what a Jetson is, “when the sun hits it.”
    “Yes, and there’s quite a bit of sun.”
    “Next time I’m bringing shades,” I said.
    “I’m not going to stop you.” Granddad said that part with a smile, and that felt good—warm in the way that warm is good—and suddenly that was all I wanted: to make my granddad happy again, to stop feeling so frightened and angry about his getting sicker.Taking care is a cure, my mother had said. Back when she was smart.
    “I see the old Sansui hasn’t been budged,” I said.
    “After all you did to fix it up, Teresa and I weren’t going to risk it.”
    “You in the mood for music?”
    “Music would be fine.”
    “Anything in particular?”
    “How about my old friend Ella?” He waved his hand toward the stack of records. I crossed the floor and started sorting.
    “She have a last name?” I asked.
    “Fitzgerald,” he said.
    “A rapper, right?” I asked him. I turned and saw him shake his head.
    “She came from nothing to become something,” he said. “A schoolgirl dreaming of becoming a dancer who became a singer almost by accident. Aideen adored her. I’d come home from the refinery, and I’d find her here, in this room, the furniture allshoved aside and Fitzgerald on the radio, live from Birdland or the Apollo or someplace. Aideen would be dancing with the moon. Whole moon or quarter. Never mattered. She’d have the music dialed up so loud that she wouldn’t have heard me come in. I’d stand where Teresa is standing, watching.”
    Teresa, I remembered, and turned and saw that some runaway hair had fallen down into her face. She must have slipped back into the room like a shadow, and she was doing nothing but standing there, out of sight, almost. “Didn’t you want to dance too?” I asked Granddad.
    “Watching was sweeter.”
    “Didn’t she mind being spied upon?”
    “Don’t think she did.” He got a funny look on his face, the kind that Mom used to get when a new sprout of basil would push out of the glass or the fireflies would light up a room.
    “What kind of dancer was she?”
    “Nothing was more