Nobody saved Marguerite Delacroix a seat near the dance floor. At her grandson Tyler's wedding, somebody had tucked her table into the back corner of the Magnolia Room, wedged between a fake ficus tree collecting dust and the service door the waiters kept banging through with trays of shrimp cocktail. Nobody meant anything cruel by it. That's just where you put an eighty-one-year-old woman at a wedding with a DJ this loud — somewhere she wouldn't get knocked over, somewhere the subwoofer wouldn't rattle her fillings loose. Except it did anyway. The bass came up through the floor of the banquet hall outside Baton Rouge and hummed in the soles of her orthopedic flats, the ones she'd driven forty-five minutes to three different Payless stores to find before they all closed for good.
She sat with her spine straight as a yardstick, running her fingers — knuckles swollen, veins like blue cording — over the white tablecloth. A splash of sweet tea had dried into a small brown ring in front of her plate. The room smelled like fried catfish and about six different perfumes fighting each other. Somebody's centerpiece, a mason jar stuffed with hydrangeas and string lights, kept catching the strobe from the dance floor and throwing little blue flashes across her water glass.
Tyler stood up front under an arch wrapped in ivy and fairy lights, gorgeous in a navy suit that pulled a little across the shoulders because he'd bulked up since the fitting. His bride, Haley, glowed in tulle like a cloud that had wandered in off the bayou. Somewhere behind them, guests kept hollering for the couple to kiss, glasses clinking hard enough to chip.
Tyler's mother — Marguerite's daughter-in-law, Renee — kept fluttering by the corner table smelling like hairspray and a second glass of champagne, a thin gold cross bouncing against her collarbone.
"Mama D, you want me to get you more tea? Or here, try the boudin balls, they're so good—" She dropped one on Marguerite's plate, already leaking grease onto the china, then was gone again, hem catching on a chair leg. "Oh! DJ's calling me for the bouquet thing!"
Her son Michael came by later, reeking of Marlboros and Crown Royal, leaning both hands on the back of her chair like an old man himself.
"You doing okay, Mama? Blood pressure good? Duane's out front with the truck running if you need him — told him to keep the AC on. One word and he'll run you home."
They were good people. Frantic, but good. None of them noticed her right foot, tucked into that flat black shoe, tapping out a small stubborn rhythm against the parquet. None of them noticed the spoon trembling against the rim of her abandoned coffee cup every time the bass dropped. That rhythm went somewhere deeper than her foot. It went to the place under her ribs where a heart used to answer music like that.
Then the DJ cut the dance track and slid into something slow. An old waltz, oddly amplified, the bass turned up too high for something so tender. Marguerite looked away, out through the tall windows at the interstate, where a line of red taillights crawled home through the Louisiana dusk, blinking almost in unison.
Sixty-one years before that, in the summer of 1965, everything had been different. Her Wesley wore short-sleeve shirts that always bunched wrong across his shoulder blades, and his hands stayed scabbed all June from wrestling with a bicycle chain that never stayed on right. They lived four houses apart on Dumaine Street in a part of New Orleans that smelled like the river most mornings, and cut through the Guidrys' backyard on a path worn bare in the St. Augustine grass.
Her mother sewed the wedding dress herself, off a bolt of pale dotted swiss traded for two cartons of Pall Malls from a cousin who worked the docks. The fabric frayed if you looked at it wrong, and her mother cut it on the kitchen table over a layer of old Times-Picayunes, cussing softly every time the shears slipped. The white pumps — a size too small on purpose, because that's what the store had — tore blisters into her heels the size of dimes. Wesley made her dance in them anyway, out behind the levee where a little brass band sometimes played on Sundays, stomping on her feet in his work boots like a man twice his size.
The wedding was set for a Saturday. Friday morning, early, Wesley drove his uncle's truck out toward Covington for lumber to fix a porch. Capucine — everybody called her Capu back then — sat by the window sewing the last pearl button onto her cuff. The knock came hard. Her neighbor, Miss Odile, stood on the step wringing her hands in a faded apron, gasping, unable to get a single word out.
A freight train. A crossing with no gate. Skid marks in the gravel that went on forever.
The dress rotted eventually, shoved into a cardboard trunk on top of a closet nobody opened. Capu lay two weeks on her narrow bed, facing a wall of faded floral paper, not crying — howling, tearing her nails against the linoleum while her mother poured watered-down whiskey with honey down her throat to calm her.
Five empty years later, she married Harold. He worked as a senior draftsman at an engineering firm downtown, wore thick black-framed glasses that always slid down his nose, and folded his slacks over the back of a chair every night with the crease lined up exact. Harold was steady. There was always a sack of Louisiana rice in the pantry and a case of Community Coffee on the shelf. But at not one wedding, not one office Christmas party, did she ever again walk out to the middle of a dance floor. She sat by the wall, twisting a cocktail napkin into a damp rope, and watched other people's feet move to the music.
Marguerite dug into her handbag, resting heavy on her lap, found a folded tissue at the bottom, and dabbed hard at the corners of her eyes. Powder came off on the tissue in a beige smear. She'd used the concealer to even out her skin that morning, same as always.
Time to ask Michael to send for Duane, she thought.
The music in the room dropped out all at once. The DJ, a heavyset man squeezed into a maroon vest, tapped the mic. Feedback shrieked through the speakers.
"Alright, y'all — we're taking a little detour from the salad course!" he boomed. "White dance is cancelled tonight, folks, because our groom here's decided to take matters into his own hands. He's about to ask the most important lady in his life onto this floor. Bride, don't you worry now!"
Marguerite let her gaze drift over the table, landing on a half-empty saltshaker. Probably going for his mother. Or maybe the great-aunt who'd flown in from Houston that morning, the one who'd complained all night about the humidity and her blood pressure.
She only looked up when a spotlight swung across the room and hit her square in the face, throwing the shadow of the dusty ficus leaves against the wall behind her.
Tyler was walking toward her.
He moved between the tables, pushing heavy banquet chairs aside with his hip, jackets sliding off the backs of some of them. The whole room went strangely quiet — quiet enough that she heard, faint and far off, a pot lid clatter onto the kitchen tile.
He stopped right in front of her. He smelled like the barbershop cologne he'd paid too much for yesterday to get his beard lined up, and a little like good bourbon. He bent at the waist and held out one hand, palm up. A new wedding band caught the light on his finger.
"Grandma D." His voice cracked a little, the way it used to when he was fourteen and forgetting how to talk to girls. "You're gonna dance with me. I already told the DJ — 'Unforgettable.' Nat King Cole. You told me once that was the song you and Grandpa Wesley were supposed to dance to. You remember telling me that?"
She hadn't told many people that. She'd told Tyler, once, on her porch on Dumaine, shucking corn together the summer he turned twelve, half thinking he wasn't even listening.
Her hand came up before her mind caught up to it. Michael half-rose from his seat across the room, mouth open, not sure whether to help or stay put. Renee had both hands pressed to her chest, mascara already starting to run. Duane, waiting out front in the idling truck, would never even know this part happened.
Marguerite stood. Her knees complained. The black flats she'd hunted three stores for found the parquet, and for one second the whole room tilted, sixty-one years folding down into no distance at all.
Tyler didn't dance like a groom showing off for a crowd. He danced slow, careful, watching her feet the way she used to watch Wesley's, making sure not to step wrong. Nat King Cole's voice rolled out over the room, and under it, so quiet only she could feel it, that old rhythm came back up through the floor and settled where it belonged, under her ribs.
When the song ended, she didn't sit back down at the corner table.
She walked instead to her handbag, pulled out her phone, and called her attorney, Ben Fontenot, right there in the hallway by the restrooms, the wedding noise muffled behind the door. Monday morning, she told him, she wanted the deed to the Dumaine Street house — the one she and Harold had bought in 1971, the one worth close to three hundred and ten thousand dollars now — put in Tyler's name outright, no waiting for a will, no probate court, no Michael and Renee arguing over it later. She'd been sitting on that decision for six years, ever since Harold passed, unable to decide who deserved it. Tonight she decided.
She hung up, tucked the phone back into her bag, and went to find her son to tell him herself, before he heard it any other way.
"Mama, you don't have to do that right now," Michael said, already reaching for her arm like she might tip over.
"I know I don't have to," she said. "I want to."
Then she went back to the dance floor, waved off the chair by the ficus tree for good, and stayed out there — not dancing every song, just standing near the edge where the light was, watching her grandson turn his new wife under the strings of lights, tapping her foot on purpose this time, loud enough for anyone to see.
