She walked into the Valentine's dance in a blue dress, and Bud Hayes dropped his punch cup.
It hit the linoleum and rolled under the table. Red punch went across the floor and onto his good shoes. Two women at the next table looked over.
Bud didn't notice. He was looking at the woman in the blue dress.
She'd stopped just inside the door of the Cypress Hollow Senior Center to take off her coat. She was small and silver-haired and straight-backed, and she laughed at something the woman with her said, and she tipped her head a little to one side when she laughed.
Bud had seen that once before. In May of 1968, in a high school gym in Akron, Ohio, under a ceiling full of crepe paper.
Bud was seventy-six. He'd been living in Cypress Hollow, Florida, for eight months, in a two-bedroom villa his daughter had found for him after his wife passed.
He hadn't wanted to move. Jenny had told him he couldn't sit alone in that house in Akron through another Ohio winter, and she'd been right, and he hadn't forgiven her yet.
He'd come to the Valentine's dance because Jenny had called him three times that afternoon to make sure he was going.
"Just go, Dad," she'd said. "You don't have to dance. Just eat a cookie and talk to somebody. Please."
So he'd put on his sport coat and his good shoes and gone to eat a cookie.
Her name had been Linda Kowal.
She'd been sixteen that spring, a junior, with a ponytail and a laugh you could hear across the cafeteria. Bud had been a senior who worked after school at his uncle's gas station and had never once in his life talked to a girl like Linda Kowal on purpose.
He'd asked her to the prom in the hallway outside the chemistry room. He'd practiced it for a week. When he finally said it, it came out as one long word.
She'd said yes before he'd even finished.
He'd rented a powder blue tuxedo. He'd borrowed his father's Pontiac. And he'd danced with her exactly once, to "Unchained Melody," because the band had saved it for last and he'd been too nervous to dance to anything faster.
He'd stepped on her left foot twice.
"You owe me a dance, Buddy Hayes," she'd said at her front door at midnight, laughing. "One where you don't step on me."
He never paid her back.
He was drafted in the spring of 1969. Two years in the Army, one of them in Vietnam. Linda's family moved to Cleveland while he was gone.
They wrote to each other for a while, and then the letters came less often, and then they didn't come at all. Neither of them did anything wrong. It was just a long time, and they were very young.
He came home and went to work at the tire plant in Akron. He married Carol in 1974.
They were married forty-eight years. He'd loved her every one of them, and he still talked to her some nights, out loud, in the villa.
He hadn't thought about Linda Kowal in years.
He still had the picture somewhere, though. The two of them under a paper arch, him in the powder blue tuxedo, her in a pale blue dress with a white carnation corsage on her wrist. Carol had found it once in a shoebox and laughed about that tuxedo for a week.
Now she was across the room at the Cypress Hollow Senior Center, sitting down at a table by the window with three other women, and Bud's heart was going so hard he could hear it.
The band was called the Silver Notes. They were five retired men in red vests, and they were better than they had any right to be. They played "Moon River." They played "Stardust." Couples went out onto the floor.
Bud sat at his table with punch on his shoes for three songs, working up his nerve.
He was seventy-six years old. He'd been through a war and forty-eight years of marriage and two heart stents and his wife's funeral. And he sat there with his hands sweating on his knees like it was 1968 and he was standing outside the chemistry room.
During the fourth song, he stood up.
He crossed the room. It seemed very long. He stopped beside her table, and the four women looked up at him.
"Excuse me," Bud said. His voice came out rough. "I'm sorry to interrupt. Would you like to dance?"
She looked up at him.
There was nothing in her face. A polite smile, a little puzzled. Her eyes went over his bald head and his white beard and his sport coat and came back to his face without stopping anywhere.
"That's very kind," she said. "I'm sorry. Do I know you?"
Bud stood there.
Before he could answer, a tall man with a white crew cut came up on her other side and held out his hand.
"Linda," the man said. "You promised me the next one."
She smiled at Bud, apologetic, the way you'd smile at a stranger. Then she took the tall man's hand and went out onto the dance floor with him.
Bud watched her go. Her name tag said LINDA, and under it, in smaller letters, the place she was from.
Akron, Ohio.
She didn't remember him at all.