Mulberry and Midnight

I wiped the dust off the champagne tap with my sleeve. It was silver, old, engraved with a vineyard map that made no sense for a silkworm farm in Mazama, but the lady who ran the orchard swore it belonged there. I set it on the wooden crate and adjusted it until it sat straight. Dusk was coming on fast. The mulberry trees went purple in the low light, and the cocoons hung off the branches like little paper lanterns. Somewhere past the tree line, our apartment sat with its thin walls and its cold half of the bed.

Seven years of marriage. I was thirty-six, Vincent was thirty-seven, and lately we had been living like polite roommates who split the dishes.

So I decided to fix it the only way I knew how. With dancing.

"Vincent," I called toward the gate. "Come here."

He came shuffling down the gravel path with his phone in one hand and his cardigan buttoned wrong. Loan officer of the year, my husband. He looked at the crate, the tap, the trees, then at me.

"What is all this?"

"Solstice," I said. "The longest day of the year. There's supposed to be a solar flare tonight, some aurora thing if we're lucky. And I'm going to teach you to waltz."

He laughed. The bad laugh, the one he used when he wanted out of something. "Sadie. I'm the stiffest man in the state of Washington. My knees crack when I stand up from my desk chair. My coworkers hold a pool on it."

"That's disgusting and also not an excuse."

"Can't we just drink the champagne and watch the sky?"

I picked up his hand. His fingers were cold, the way they always were, and I laced mine through them. "No. We dance. You're not too stiff. I've seen you carry a sofa up three flights of stairs. Your body works fine."

"That was seven years ago. My back has filed its own paperwork since then."

"Come on." I tugged him, just gently, past the crate and under the canopy of trees. The gravel gave way to soft dirt and clover. "One dance. If you hate it, we never speak of it again, and I'll do the taxes this year without complaining."

"You already do the taxes."

"Then I'll do them without complaining twice."

He sighed, the long-suffering sigh of a man who knows he has already lost, and set his phone face-down on the crate next to the tap. "Fine. Show me, professor."

So I showed him.

I put his right hand where it belonged, on my waist, and took his left in mine. His other arm went up, bent at the elbow, holding my hand at the height of my shoulder. He stood there as a man being fitted for a suit two sizes too small.

"Box step," I said. "Slow, slow, quick-quick. Forward, side, together. Back, side, together. The dance is complete, Vincent. You can't fail this."

"Watch me."

I counted it out. One, two, three. He stepped on my foot twice. He apologized both times, formally, like he was leaving a voicemail. But by the fourth box he had stopped looking at his feet and started looking at me, which was the actual lesson, though he didn't know that yet.

The hour of the solstice settled over the orchard. The light went gold, then copper, then a deep blue that made the mulberries look almost black. A solar flare was supposed to hit the atmosphere somewhere above us, and the whole farm hummed with it, or maybe that was just the wind in the leaves and the thousand quiet munching silkworms doing their work in the dark.

"Okay," I said. "Now the turn. Watch me!"

I let go of him and did it alone, slow. Step, side, turn under my own arm, face the other way, step back. The skirt of my dress swung out, dark red cotton, and settled. I did it again, faster.

"Your turn. You hold still and I turn, then we trade."

"That seems like a lot of moving parts."

"You build loan portfolios for a living. This has fewer parts."

He tried it. Step, side, and then his hand came up to steady himself and it landed on the fabric of my dress, right at the small of my back, and slid an inch before he caught it. His palm was warm through the cotton. I felt it all the way up my spine.

"Sorry," he said, hand hovering, not sure where he was allowed to put it.

I took his wrist and set his palm flat against my waist. "There. That's where it goes. All of it, not just the fingers. You've been touching me like I'm made of glass for about a year, Vincent."

His breath went out of him slow. "I didn't know that's what I was doing."

"I know. That's kind of the problem."

We stood there in the blue dark with his hand on my waist and the cocoons hanging above us, quiet as ornaments. A leaf came down and landed on his shoulder and neither of us brushed it off.

"Again," I said, softer. "Count with me this time."

We boxed. One, two, three. His hand stayed on my waist, pressing now, real pressure, and my hip fit against his like it used to. The champagne tap waited on the crate with nobody drinking from it. I didn't care. The tap had come with the orchard rental, some leftover prop from a harvest dinner two summers ago, and it could keep.

One, two, three. He turned me under his arm and I came around and my back found his chest, my shoulders against him, his chin near my ear. We stopped there, mid-box, my head tipping back against his collarbone.

"Sadie," he said, quiet. "I've missed you. I didn't know how to say it, so I just... worked more. I'm sorry."

"I know. I missed you too. You were right there in bed next to me and I missed you, which is the stupidest math in the world."

He laughed a little, and I felt it in his chest against my back. His hand moved from my waist around to the front of my hip, slow, asking without words, and I covered it with my own and held it there.

"The flare's supposed to peak in twenty minutes," he said into my hair.

"Good. We have time."

"For what?"

I turned in his arms and looked up at him. Thirty-seven years old, silver coming in at his temples, buttoned wrong, dirt on his shoe from stepping on the wrong part of the box step, and I had married this man at twenty-nine because he was the only person in that dance class who laughed when he fell over.

"For me to teach you the second lesson," I said. "The one I don't have a name for yet."

The sky did something. I can't describe it better than that. The blue above the mulberry crowns flushed pink at the edges, then red, then a deep bruised gold that had no business being in the sky at nine at night. The flare was arriving. The whole orchard turned the color of the inside of a peach.

"Vincent. Look up."

He looked. Cocoons, branches, that sky. His mouth opened and closed.

"Oh," he said. "Oh, that's..."

"Yeah."

We stood still and let the light do its thing. It came through the leaves and landed on his face in little coins, red-gold, moving when the branches moved. He looked younger in that light. He looked like the man who fell over in a dance class and laughed about it.

"It's like the trees are on fire," he said. "In a good way. If fire had a good way."

"That's the flare. Told you it was worth coming out."

"You did. You said it and I said the soil report needed finishing and I was wrong." He said it plainly. No apology performance. Just the fact.

I reached up and took his face in both hands. His jaw needed a shave. His cheeks were warm from the walk and the wine and the light.

"Listen to me. The solstice is the longest day of the year. It's for one thing and one thing only."

"Photosynthesis?"

"Stop it. It's for forgetting your worries. All of them. The soil report, the pool about your knees, everything. It doesn't exist tonight."

"That's not how worries work."

"It's exactly how worries work if you decide it is. I'm the teacher. Second lesson." I slid my hands down to his shoulders. "The dip. Every waltz ends in a dip. You put your hand here," I moved it to the small of my back, "and you lower me down and you hold all my weight. All of it. Can you do that?"

"That's a lot of trust in my lower back."

"Seven years of trust. The sofa. Three flights of stairs. I watched you do that. Your back is fine."

He grinned. "The sofa was a mistake I'm still paying for."

"The sofa was a triumph and you know it. Now. On three."

He dipped me. Not smoothly. There was a moment where I genuinely thought about my insurance, and then his arm locked and caught me and I was hanging back over it, upside down world, mulberries and red sky and cocoons hanging like little paper lanterns, and his face above mine holding steady. All my weight, in his arm. He had it.