Foxfire Waltz

Vickie Richardson was forty-one years old and driving a mail truck up a gravel road in the Cascade foothills, and she thought, not for the first time that week, that she had no idea how she'd gotten here. Well, that wasn't true. She knew exactly how she'd gotten here. She'd answered an ad for a rural mail contract route at Pine Valley National Recreation Area because her life in the city had gone stale as old bread, and because a string of dull dates had convinced her that the problem might be the city and not her.

The truck bumped along and she bumped along with it, one hand on the wheel and one on her coffee thermos. The campground was still mostly empty this early in the season, just a few hardy RVers scattered around the loops and a ranger station that smelled like diesel and pine needles. She'd been given a little A-frame cabin near the staff area, and she'd spent her first night there listening to the creek and feeling strangely pleased with herself.

(Which was ridiculous, she knew. She was delivering mail. To a campground. But a person could take her victories where she found them.)

* * *

Her route was simple enough, or it had been all week. The camp host had packages, the rangers had packages, and there was one delivery out past the far loop that the map just labeled CREEK SITE, which had sounded mysterious the first time she read it and mundane the second. On Friday morning she found herself bumping down that narrow spur with a padded envelope the size of a laptop wedged beside her seat.

The site turned out to be a secluded clearing with an old Airstream trailer parked near the water, looking like it had been there since the seventies and never moved since. There was a garden off to one side, tidy and green despite the season, and a hand-painted wooden sign that said GOLDSTEIN in careful block letters.

Vickie stared at that sign for longer than made sense.

She knew that name. She hadn't known it was here, obviously, she'd read the delivery log like anyone else, but seeing it in carved wood next to a creek she'd never seen before gave her a jolt anyway. Seth Goldstein. She'd known a Seth Goldstein once, a quiet guy in her drawing elective her senior year of college, twenty years back now, when they were both twenty-two and he used to sit in the back with charcoal on his fingers and never say a word unless you asked him something first.

She was still staring when the trailer door opened and a man came out carrying a mug, and it was him, older of course, forty-two by his face, but with the same dark hair and the same way of standing like he was waiting for the world to make a move first.

"Vickie?" he said, and she nearly dropped the package.

"Seth. Oh my god. Seth Goldstein!"

He set the mug down on the trailer's step and came toward her with his hand half out, uncertain whether to shake hers or not, and she solved it for him by stepping in and giving him a quick hug, because twenty years was long enough that a hug seemed right even if it also felt a little strange.

"I didn't know you were out here," he said. "I didn't know anyone was out here. I mean, I know the campground exists, but I didn't think about who worked it."

"I just started. Mail route. It's not glamorous." She held out the envelope. "This is yours, I think. I've been staring at your sign like an idiot."

He took it, glanced at it, set it aside without opening it, which told her something about how much he cared for whatever was inside. "Do you want coffee? I have real coffee, the good kind, and it's still hot."

"I have coffee." She gestured at her truck, where her thermos sat on the dash. "But thank you."

"Come back anyway," he said, and then seemed to hear himself and half-laughed. "I mean, sometime. Whenever you're out here. It gets quiet, and I like talking to people who aren't me."

She told him she might do that, and she meant it, though she drove away thinking she probably wouldn't, because that was the kind of thing people said.

* * *

She came back the next Friday.

She told herself it was because the route gave her time, and it did, her mornings were done by eleven and her afternoons were nothing but long light and gravel. But really she came back because she'd spent the whole week wondering what a man did all day alone by a creek, and because talking to Seth had been easy in a way talking to her last three dates had not been easy.

He was in his garden when she pulled in, and he straightened up and smiled like he'd been expecting her, which he probably had.

"I brought nothing," she said, getting out. "I realized on the drive over that I should have brought something, and then I didn't."

"You brought yourself. That's plenty." He wiped his hands on his jeans. "Sit down. There's chairs. I'll get coffee."

They sat by the creek and talked for two hours, about college and about what came after, and she learned that he'd inherited the trailer from an uncle and moved out here eight years ago to get away from a city that had worn him down in much the same way hers had worn her down. He painted, sometimes, and sold pieces at a gallery two towns over. He kept the garden going. He walked a lot.

"And I dance," he said, like it was an afterthought, and she must have looked surprised because he laughed. "Old-time dancing. Waltzes, mostly. Some polka. There's a meadow back past the trees there, and I go out at dusk when the light's good and I practice."

"Every night?"

"Nearly every night."

"Alone?"

"Alone." He turned his mug in his hands. "It sounds lonelier than it is. You could come watch sometime, if you wanted. I don't mind an audience."

She said she'd think about it, and he said good, and neither of them made it into more than that.

* * *

She thought about it all week.

On Wednesday she delivered his mail and stayed for coffee, and on Thursday she stayed longer, and by Friday she'd admitted to herself that the highlight of her day was the drive out past the far loop, which was either sweet or pathetic depending on how she felt about herself that morning. He never pushed. He never even asked. He just made coffee and told stories about his uncle and the terrible wiring in the old trailer, and she laughed more than she'd laughed in months.

On Saturday he said, almost offhand, "It's a clear evening. If you wanted to see the meadow, dusk's in about an hour."

She said yes.

The meadow was a half mile walk through the trees on a trail he'd cut himself, and it opened up, all long grass and wildflowers going to seed, ringed by firs with the first of the evening light coming through them sideways and gold. She stood there at the edge and just breathed.

"You weren't kidding about the light," she said.

"It's the whole reason I come out here. Well." He shrugged. "Part of it."

He'd brought a small speaker in a canvas bag, and he set it on a flat rock, and soon there was a fiddle tune coming out of it, something old and sweet with a lilt to it that she felt in her sternum. And then Seth walked out into the grass and began to dance, and Vickie forgot how to breathe for a second time that day.

He was good. That didn't cover it. He moved like the music was coming from inside him and he was just letting it out, waltzing through the tall grass in slow wide turns, his arms shaping the air, his feet finding beats she couldn't even hear. There was something almost impossible in it, a smoothness to the way he turned that didn't look practiced so much as natural, as if he'd been doing this since before he had bones. The light caught him and turned him gold at the edges, and Vickie stood at the meadow's edge with her arms crossed over her chest and watched him and felt something pull low in her belly that she hadn't felt in a long, long time.

He danced through two songs and part of a third, and when the fiddle wound down he came walking back toward her through the grass, slightly flushed, slightly breathless, looking younger than his forty-two-year-old face and older than it at the same time.

"Well?" he said.

"That was," she started, and had to stop and start again. "Seth, that was beautiful. Where did you learn to move like that?"

He was quiet for a moment, looking out at the meadow instead of at her, and when he answered his voice was light but not entirely. "A long time ago. Longer than you'd think."

"Teach me," she said, before she could stop herself.

He turned then, and she couldn't read something in his face, surprise maybe, or relief, or something older than either. "You want to learn?"

"I want to learn. God knows I'm clumsy, I trip over flat floors, but yes. Teach me."

"Okay," he said, and smiled, and the last of the sun went gold behind the firs. "Okay. We can start next week. Wear shoes you can move in."

She walked back to the truck in the dark with her heart doing something she didn't have a name for yet, and she thought that maybe, just maybe, her fresh start had actually started.

The first lesson was on a Tuesday, which Vickie only remembered because she'd driven the whole route that morning thinking about it, and she'd nearly left a package at the wrong site because her head was somewhere else entirely. Seth was waiting by the trailer when she pulled up just after eleven, and he'd cleared a patch of ground near the creek and set the speaker on the same flat rock he always used, and he looked, she thought, nervously excited, which made two of them.

"So the fox-trot," he said, when she'd gotten out and stretched her legs. "It's the best place to start. Waltz looks easier but it isn't, it's all in the rise and fall and that takes years to not look silly. Fox-trot you can fake and still have fun."

"I'm going to be terrible," she warned him.

"Oh, absolutely," he said, and grinned, and she swatted his arm and laughed and that, more or less, set the