In Time

I think it was me.

I think I turned from the sink with my hands still wet and held them up, half a question, and Hal looked at me for a long second, and then he set down the dish towel and took them.

And we danced.

In the kitchen, at ten o’clock at night, both of us in our sixties, both of us stiff and rusty and terrible at it, stepping on each other the way he’d stepped on me in 1983.

He’d forgotten how to lead and I’d forgotten how to follow and for the first thirty seconds it was a clumsy negotiated mess, two people who couldn’t feel the next step in each other’s hands anymore.