Bud went back to his table and sat down.
Somebody had wiped up the punch. A clean cup sat at his place, full. He didn't drink it.
He watched her dance with the tall man with the crew cut. They danced well together. The man said something, and she laughed, and she tipped her head a little to one side.
Bud looked at his hands.
It had been fifty-eight years. He was bald and bearded and sixty pounds heavier than the boy in the powder blue tuxedo.
She'd been sixteen. She'd had a whole life since, a husband and children and grandchildren, probably, and a thousand dances, and of course she didn't remember one nervous boy from a gas station who'd stepped on her foot.
He'd been foolish to think she would. He'd go home. He'd call Jenny and tell her he ate a cookie.
He stood up and reached for his coat.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. It was a text from Jenny.
Are you dancing yet?
He looked at it for a long time. Then he put the phone away and set his coat back down on the chair.
He didn't go to Linda's table. He went the other way, across the room, to the little stage where the Silver Notes were tuning up between songs.
The bandleader was a retired music teacher named Ernie with a gray ponytail and a saxophone. He leaned down.
"Request?" Ernie said.
"Can you play 'Unchained Melody'?"
Ernie grinned. "Brother, at this age we can play it in our sleep. The Righteous Brothers version?"
"That's the one."
"Next song," Ernie said. "Somebody special?"
Bud thought about it.
"I owe somebody a dance," he said.
The Silver Notes finished "Moonlight Serenade." The couples on the floor clapped and started to drift back to their tables.
Then Ernie stepped up to the microphone.
"This next one goes out from a gentleman who says he owes somebody a dance," Ernie said. "He didn't say who. I guess she'll know."
The piano started. Slow, simple, the opening notes Bud had heard in a high school gym in May of 1968, under a ceiling full of crepe paper.
Bud didn't move from beside the stage. He didn't walk over to her table. He just stood there, with his hands at his sides, and let the song play.
Across the room, Linda had just sat back down.
She was reaching for her purse. She stopped.
Bud watched her stop. He watched her sit very still with her hand on the purse while the first verse played. Then she lifted her head and turned and looked across the dance floor, slowly, searching, the way you look for somebody in a crowded airport.
Her eyes found him. They stopped.
She stood up.
She came across the floor. The tall man with the crew cut said something to her as she went past, and she didn't hear him.
She stopped in front of Bud, close enough that he could see she was crying a little. She looked at his bald head and his white beard and his sport coat. Then she looked at his eyes, for a long moment.
"Powder blue tuxedo," she said.
Bud nodded. He couldn't say anything.
"You stepped on my left foot," Linda said. "Twice."
"Yes, ma'am."
"And at my front door, I told you that you owed me a dance."
"You did."
"Buddy Hayes," she said, and she laughed, and she tipped her head a little to one side. "You had hair."
"I had hair," Bud said.
She held out her hand.
They danced.
He was careful. He was so careful that she laughed at him and told him to relax, she'd had her left ankle rebuilt in 2019 and it was half titanium now. That made him laugh too, and after that it was easier.
She told him about Cleveland. About a husband named Dennis who'd been a mailman for thirty years and who'd died three years ago. Two sons, five grandchildren, a daughter-in-law in Ocala who'd talked her into the Valentine's dance.
He told her about the Army and the tire plant and Carol. Forty-eight years. Jenny, who'd talked him into the dance too.
He told her about the picture in the shoebox. She said she had the same one, in an album in her closet, and that her granddaughter had asked her once who the boy in the blue tuxedo was.
"What did you tell her?" Bud asked.
"I told her he was a boy who owed me a dance," Linda said.
"I didn't know you at first," Linda said, close to his shoulder. "I'm sorry. You just looked like a nice man in a sport coat."
"I am a nice man in a sport coat."
"You were a nice boy in a terrible tuxedo," she said.
The song went on. The Silver Notes played it slow, slower than the record, and Ernie added a long saxophone part in the middle that Bud suspected wasn't on the original.
Bud didn't mind. He was in no hurry for it to end.
Across the room, on his table, his phone buzzed again in his coat pocket. He didn't hear it.
When the last notes faded, Linda stepped back and looked down at her feet. Then up at him.
"Well," she said. "Not once."
Bud looked down at her blue shoes, both of them untouched. Then he turned toward the stage and held up one finger, and Ernie, grinning, started the song again.