Free Dancing with the Dead by John Lutz

freshen her breath before dance lessons. “You gonna forgive Fred?” she asked.
    “To forgive’s divine,” Angie said, chomping on her Life Saver so hard Mary feared she might break a tooth. “It’s in the Bible.”
    “I don’t remember the nuns at Saint Elizabeth’s telling me that.”
    “You done really well in school, Mary, right through college. I mean, truly applied yourself.”
    “Is Fred gonna be the recipient of divine forgiveness?”
    Angie stared out the window at the sparse Sunday morning traffic. “Fred’s all I got, such as he is.”
    “Could be worse, I guess,” Mary said.
    “We tell ourselves that, don’t we?”
    “Yeah, we do.”
    “You’re a good daughter.”
    “I know, I know.”
    “Gimme another one of them mints, will you? Women like us, we gotta stick together.”

13
    T HEY SAT IN A WINDOW booth, gazing out at the traffic swishing past on Kingshighway, while they ate Uncle Bill’s pancakes and sipped coffee. The restaurant was crowded as always on Sunday mornings; many of the customers were dressed up, on their way to or from church. Waitresses scurried between the tables, balancing trays of hotcakes, eggs, and steaming coffee, refilling cups and smiling and dealing out checks signed with a scrawled “Thank you” above their names. In the air was the faint smell of hot cooking grease and frying bacon. The murmur of conversation flowed over the clinking of flatware and china.
    Angie had ordered wheat cakes and saturated them with butter and syrup. She didn’t say much while she ate, but Mary could see she was feeling better, and the three cups of strong black coffee she’d downed had to have gone a long way toward sobering her completely.
    After her last bite of pancake, Angie fumbled in her purse for a cigarette, then leaned back and fired it up with a disposable lighter. An elderly couple at a nearby table glared as a finger of smoke found them, but Angie paid no attention. This was the smoking section, and Mary knew her mother would defend with nail and fang her constitutional right to foul the air. Her life was pulled this way and that by forces she didn’t understand, but what territory she was sure of, she would fight for with tenacity beyond reason. Mary was glad the people at the nearby table were almost finished eating. She’d seen militant nonsmokers and Angie clash before, and didn’t want to see it again. She wondered as she often did how a woman so fierce in public could have been such a punching bag for Duke.
    As if reading her mind, Angie exhaled a glob of smoke thick as cream and said, “It’s a pattern that’s sometimes impossible to break, a relationship like yours and Jake’s.”
    Well, she hadn’t been reading her mind quite accurately. “I was thinking about you and Duke,” Mary said. She could defend her territory in public, too.
    Angie’s mouth smiled beneath weary eyes, her teeth stained by years of nicotine. “Okay, just so there’s some way I can get you to understand. Duke, Jake, they’re all alike; put ’em in a bag and shake it and it don’t matter which drops out. That’s the point. It’s like they’re born with the need and the cruelty, and early on they learn what buttons to press and strings to pull so they can control people. Some men are like that. They move knowing how it’ll make us move. It’s like a dance we do and we got no choice in. You oughta understand that.”
    Mary stared out the window. “That’s not my idea of dancing.”
    “Okay, so it was a bad whatchamacallit—an analergy.”
    “Analogy,” Mary corrected. “An allergy’s something that makes you sneeze.”
    “So I see why you was a whiz in school.” Angie flicked ashes onto her plate. “I phoned your apartment yesterday morning. Jake answered.”
    “He didn’t spend the night,” Mary said, irritated that she felt she owed her mother an explanation. Maybe the reference to school had put her in that frame of mind; lonely hours of study, trying to