Cowboy Boots and Karaoke

*This one's for everyone who ever tried to learn something new and ended up with more bruises than progress. Hope it makes you laugh and maybe blush a little. Thanks for reading.*

I was twenty-three years old and hungover on a Saturday morning, standing on my own porch in socks, and there was a woman doing dance moves in my driveway. That's the kind of sentence I never thought I'd write, but here we are.

Monika Leland lives two properties down from me. She's twenty-eight, she's got dark hair she usually keeps in a braid, and she was over there in my gravel driveway doing what looked like a box step while the sun came up over my alfalfa fields.

"Monika," I said. "It's six in the morning."

She spun around and kept moving while she talked. "It's six fifteen, and you're up, so quit whining. Why do you smell like that?"

"Fertilizer. Spilled a bag in the truck bed last night and had to clean it up."

"At two in the morning?"

"I had beer in me. Seemed like a good idea at the time." I sat down on the porch step and put my head in my hands. "Why are you dancing in my driveway?"

"Practice. I've got the regional karaoke championship coming up and this year they added a duet round. Half the score is stage movement." She stopped dancing and looked at me. "I need a partner."

"Find one at the Back Porch."

"I want you."

I laughed, and it hurt my head. "Monika, I have two left feet and a divorce. That's my whole personality right now."

"Donald will let us use the Back Porch stage for practice if I ask. He owes me."

"Donald owes everybody. That's how he keeps the bar full."

"Xander." She walked over and stood in front of the porch steps, arms crossed. "I watched you get dragged onto that stage for your birthday in March. You can keep a beat. You just won't admit it."

That was a different life. Almost a year divorced now, and I still feel like a used truck some days.

"I stepped on her feet so many times that year, she bought steel-toed boots for Christmas," I said. "True story."

"Well, I'm not buying you boots. Here's my offer." She held up a finger. "You practice with me twice a week until the competition. In exchange, I take hay off your hands. Donald's neighbor Ethel has rabbits, about a dozen of them, and she's been buying alfalfa from the co-op at criminal prices. I'll buy from you and deliver it to Ethel myself. Free advertising, you help an old lady, everybody wins."

I sat there and did the math, which was hard because of the beer still leaving my body.

"That's barely a favor," I said. "I'd sell you that hay anyway."

"But you wouldn't drive it to Ethel's twice a week. Come on. What else are you doing? Sitting on this porch feeling sorry for yourself?"

"That's a full-time job, you know."

She smiled. "Part time. You'll be busy Tuesdays and Thursdays."

I want to tell you I put up more of a fight than I did, but I didn't. The truth is my whole body was begging for a reason to get off that porch, and Monika knew it before I did.

"Fine," I said. "Tuesday. But if I break your foot, that's on you."

---

The barn was mostly empty that first Tuesday, just the smell of hay and dust and the light coming through the boards. Monika showed up in jeans and sneakers and pushed a bale over to make room.

"Okay, basic box step. Step, together, step, together. Follow my feet."

I followed her feet, sort of. Mostly I stared at the floor like it owed me money.

"Stop looking down. You look down, you go down."

"That's what I'm afraid of."

"Xander." She grabbed my hand and put it on her shoulder. "Other hand on my waist. It's a dance, not a job interview."

So there I was, hand on the waist of a woman I'd only ever waved at over a fence line, doing a box step in a barn that smelled like hay and diesel. She counted under her breath, one two three, one two three, and I got maybe eight counts in before my left boot found her right sneaker.

"Sorry. Sorry."

"It's fine. Again."

I stepped on her twice more. Then on the fourth try I stepped backward onto the bale I'd moved, which toppled into a stack of empty feed sacks, and I grabbed the nearest thing to keep from going over, and the nearest thing was Monika.

"Whoa." She caught her balance, and my hand, in the process of catching myself, landed square on her butt and stayed there about a second too long.

We both froze.

"Well," she said. "That's one way to lead."

"I'm so sorry. I was falling."

"I know what it was. You've got decent reflexes for a man who can't dance." She stepped back and rubbed her face, and I couldn't tell if she was laughing at me or with me. "We're done for today. Your head's not in it."

"It's in it. It's just also very embarrassed."

"Thursday. And Xander?" She picked up her keys off a hay bale. "That dip thing you were trying at the end, where you almost dropped me? Don't do that again unless I ask."

"There was a dip?"

"There was a dip attempt. It was a near-death experience."

---

Thursday we went to the Back Porch, which is a dive bar on the edge of town with a sticky floor and a neon boot sign in the window that buzzes like a hornet's nest. Donald Graham runs it, forty-five years old, bald, built like a chest freezer. He was wiping the bar down at four in the afternoon when we walked in.

"Monika. You here to fix the stage lights again?"

"Rehearsal. Regional championship is in three weeks, and I need the stage."

Donald looked at me. "Him?"

"This is Xander. He's my partner."

"The alfalfa kid? He lives ten miles out and smells like a field."

"I do not smell like a field today," I said. "Today I smell fine."

Donald shrugged and went back to his rag. "Stage is all yours. Try not to sue me."

Monika set up the little speakers Donald keeps behind the bar and plugged in her phone. Then, instead of our song, which we hadn't even picked yet, she queued up Abba.

"Warmup," she said. "'Dancing Queen.' Everybody knows it. Just sing along and sway."

"I'm not singing Abba."

"You're singing Abba. Loosen up. You dance like you're carrying a ladder."

I swayed, sort of. Then she hit the chorus and pointed at me, and God help me, I sang it, every word, at full volume in an empty bar while a woman five years my