Bernice Wofford's daughter dragged her to the Tuesday afternoon dance class at the Little Saluda Senior Center in January, eight months after her husband died, and the only man in the room without a partner was Odis Crump, who was seventy-eight, wore suspenders, and had not smiled in public since the Carter administration.
"You two," said the instructor, a bright young woman named Kelsey, clapping her hands. "Partners."
Odis looked at Bernice. Bernice looked at Odis.
"I don't dance," Odis said.
"Neither do I," said Bernice.
"Wonderful," said Kelsey. "Then you'll learn together."
Bernice was seventy-two. She had been married to Wilbur Wofford for fifty-one years. He had been a big, laughing, red-faced man who sold tractors and sang in the church choir and fell asleep in his recliner every night by nine. He had died in May, in his garden, with a tomato in his hand.
Since then, Bernice had not done much of anything. She went to church. She went to the grocery store. She sat on her screened porch in the evenings and looked at Wilbur's garden going to weeds.
Her daughter had finally had enough.
"Mama, you used to dance," she said. "You and Daddy danced every Saturday night when I was little. In the kitchen. To the radio."
"That was a long time ago," Bernice said.
She did not say that she had stopped dancing the day of the funeral and did not plan to start again.
Odis Crump was a retired peach farmer. Most people in Little Saluda knew who he was, and most of them crossed the street.
He was tall and stooped and gruff, with a voice like a rusty gate. He had run the Crump peach orchard for fifty years and had argued with every buyer, banker, and county agent in three counties. He had a reputation for being right about everything and pleasant about nothing.
His wife, Hazel, had died the spring before last.
Bernice could not imagine what had brought him to a dance class. He stood in the middle of the senior center floor with his arms at his sides like a man waiting for a bus.
The class was learning the Carolina shag.
It was the state dance of South Carolina. A smooth, shuffling, easy swing dance that had started on the beaches at Myrtle Beach in the 1940s, danced to beach music, slow and sweet, with a lot of fancy footwork and not much moving of the upper body.
"It's all in the feet," Kelsey said. "Lead, you go left. Follow, you go right. One and two, three and four, five, six."
Odis went right. Bernice went right. They collided.
"Left," Bernice said. "You go left."
"I know which way to go."
"Then go there."
They tried again. He stepped on her foot. She stepped on his. By the end of the hour, they had collided eleven times, and Odis had said two words, both of them "Sorry," neither of which he sounded like he meant.
Bernice went home and told her daughter she was never going back.
She went back the next Tuesday.
She did not know why. Maybe because it was the first thing since May that had made her angry instead of sad. Angry felt better.
They danced together every Tuesday in January and February.
They were terrible. Odis counted out loud, under his breath, like a man doing long division. Bernice corrected him. He ignored her. She corrected him again. Kelsey said they had a lot of energy.
But slowly, without either of them noticing, something changed.
Odis stopped stepping on her feet. Bernice stopped correcting him every step. Somewhere in the second week of February, in the middle of a slow old beach song about a girl at the shore, Bernice realized that she was not counting anymore, and neither was he.
They were just dancing.
She looked up at him, surprised. He was looking down at his feet, frowning, concentrating so hard his eyebrows met.
"You're getting better," she said.
"I know it," Odis said.
The trouble was, he would not tell her why he was there.
She asked him three times. He would not answer. He just said, "Got my reasons," and went back to counting.
So in the last week of February, at the end of class, when he was putting on his coat, Bernice stood in front of the door so he could not get out.
"Odis Crump," she said. "I've been stepped on by you for eight weeks. I've got a right to know what for."
He looked at her for a long moment. He was holding his old felt hat in both hands.
"My granddaughter's getting married," he said finally. "April the eleventh. Leigh Ann. Hazel's namesake. Her middle name's Hazel."
"That's wonderful."
"Hazel was supposed to dance with her," Odis said. "At the wedding. The grandmother dance, they call it. Hazel and Leigh Ann had it all picked out. The song and everything. Hazel made her promise." He turned the hat around in his hands. "Hazel always wanted me to learn to dance. Fifty-three years, she asked me. I always said no. I always said I'd look like a fool."
His rusty voice cracked.
"Now Leigh Ann's asked me to do it instead," he said. "In Hazel's place. And I said yes. And I don't know how."
Bernice stood in the doorway and did not say anything at all.
On the first Tuesday in March, five weeks before the wedding, Bernice arrived at the senior center to find a sign taped to the door.
TUESDAY DANCE CLASS CANCELED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. KELSEY HAS BROKEN HER ANKLE. GET WELL CARDS WELCOME.
Odis was standing in front of the sign in his suspenders and his felt hat, looking at it the way he would look at a dead peach tree.
"Five weeks," he said.
"I know."
"I'm not ready. I can do the basic. I can't do anything else. Leigh Ann's song has a turn in it, she says. I don't know a turn." He shook his head. "I'll stand there in front of two hundred people like a fence post."
He turned to go.
Bernice watched him walk toward the parking lot, stooped and slow, with his hat in his hand.
She had not danced at home since the funeral. Wilbur's old record player was in the living room, under a dust cover. His records were in the cabinet below it. The kitchen floor where they had danced every Saturday night for fifty-one years had not had a single step on it since May.
She did not want to. She did not know if she could.
"Odis," she called.
He stopped at his truck.
"Tomorrow," Bernice said. "Two o'clock. My house. On Magnolia Street. The white one with the screened porch."
He looked at her across the parking lot.
"What for?"
Bernice took a breath.
"Because I was the shag champion at the Pavilion in Myrtle Beach," she said, "in the summer of 1972. And I haven't told a soul in fifty years."