Free The Unexpected Waltz by Kim Wright

I roll to my side and curl up in a little ball. The TV remote is on the bedside table and the top drawer is crammed full of menus from every takeout place in town.
    Nothing has to change. That’s what the lawyer told me. I could lie here forever and the world would still go on.
    Elyse has always said that there are small moments that knock your life one way or another, the way an unseen rock beneath the surface of water can nudge a canoe off its course. She claims it’s the tiny stuff that makes or breaks a life—or a marriage—and the first time she told me this was on my wedding day, as she and I sat on this very same bed stuffing her squirming daughter Tory into a flower-girl dress. Elyse had been doing all the right things that morning, smiling and chattering and popping champagne corks and muttering over the dozens of small silk-covered buttons on the back of Tory’s dress, but I don’t think she expected much from my marriage. She wasn’t sure it would be enough and that’s when she said it, how it was the little things that could break you. The disappointment you brush off, the compromise that seemed worth it at the time, all the comments you let slide, even if they sting.
    You’ve got to figure out which of these small moments matter, she said. Which ones look small but are really big. And when you find them, you have to dig in and fight. Because otherwise you wake up someday, almost as if from a dream, and find that you’ve drifted to a place you don’t even recognize. You don’t know how you got there and you don’t know how to get back. She looked up at me, her eyes suspiciously bright, and said, “No kidding, Kelly, it just happens. All of a sudden you’re bewildered by your own life.”
    I didn’t want to believe her. She was starting to come out of her marriage just as I was going into mine, and our friendship has always been like this, a bit out of sync. Oh sure, we’ve had all the same experiences, but we seem to have had them at different times, like two women stuck in the same revolving door, and even though we’re often exasperated by life’s strange timing, I think we count on it too. It’s the way we protect and rescue each other. Like when we were younger and we had that rule that only one of us could get drunk at a time. Somebody had to drive.
    But I cut her off on the morning of my wedding, before she could get going on one of her full-blown speeches or, maybe worse, start to cry. Yes, her marriage may have been disappointing, but that was Elyse.She has always expected too much out of life—and way too much out of men. And thus it was her destiny to be constantly disappointed, and I told myself I wasn’t like that. I had always been the practical one who knew how to make do and adapt. To admit that Elyse had a point would have been to admit that my marriage also might fail, that I too might end up alone.
    I turn, look at the clock: 6:25. I still have plenty of time. And I know this is one of those small moments when things could as easily go one way as another. I could march downstairs, get in the car, drive to the studio, and face my fears, or I could pull this annoying clasp from my hair and go back to sleep once again. Drift just a little farther down the river of dreams.

    I ARRIVE AT THE studio at six fifty and lurk around watching the others file in. Pamela enters and I’m surprised she’s deigned to try group, but she goes off into a corner by herself and begins practicing arm movements in the mirror. And then I get swept up in rapid-fire chatter with a woman in a pink angora shell named Isabel who before I can tell her my name announces she’s been married three times and has a crush on Nik. “My husband can’t believe I’m spending the money,” she whispers, “and I tell him it’s for exercise, which of course doesn’t make any sense because the Urban Fitness place up the street is like twenty bucks a month. But I figure ballroom’s cheap when you factor in the