The Last Dance

You never think you’re going to run into your dead ex at the neighborhood bar, but that’s where Thad was, and he was wearing the clothes we’d chosen for him. I flashed back to when his sister, Lucille, called me up to ask if I’d do her a favor.

We’d always gotten on well together. She was the one family member of his who’d stayed in contact with me after he'd traded me in for the neighborhood pump. Sorry. That’s not nice. Slut. The town slut.

Or maybe Sandy wasn’t a slut at all. Maybe she was just a redhead in a sundress who didn’t butt heads with him.

Lucille called me up and she said that she needed me to go shopping with her, and I asked what for because we’d never been shopping together before, and she said Thad, and I hung up the phone.

He’d moved out while I was at work during a nightshift. I’d come home to a half-empty apartment. He’d been thorough. Dividing our silverware. Mugs. Even our posters. I’d stood there in my scrubs staring at the spot on the wall where the Van Halen poster had been, and wondering if we’d been robbed.

She’d called back.

“Look, hon. I know it’s an awful lot to ask. But I’m supposed to buy him a suit, and I don’t want to go by myself.”

“Then take Thad.”

“The mortuary guy said I couldn’t.”

“The what…?”

“Oh, shit, hon. You didn’t know?”

I’d been leaning against the wall, and now I slid down to the floor. Thad was dead? I had wished him death many a dark night, but I hadn’t really meant it. Sure, I’d imagined all sorts of deranged scenarios. Thad being stung by a billion bees. Thad falling down an endless elevator shaft. But I hadn’t wanted any of them to actually happen.

“How?” I asked softly.

“He was stung by a billion bees.”

“What the…?”

“Well, just enough to send him into anaphylactic shock. And he didn’t have his pen. Because he never carried his pen. And then while he was fighting them off, he fell down an elevator shaft.”

I was stunned into silence. Turns out, she hadn’t said any of that.

“Wasn’t looking where he was going and was hit by a bus. It’s going to be a closed casket.”

“And the suit?” I asked.

“Can’t bury him naked.”

We had no idea what size he was. Thad had preferred jeans and snarky tee-shirts, plaid flannels and beat-in hoodies. We went into the store and said, “He was 6’2”, 180.” And the clerk said, “Was?” and Lucy started to cry.

She ended up sitting on the little sofa in the center of the men’s shop drinking whiskey from her flask, while I purchased the 42L and the 32” waist trousers, and we bought him some shoes although I’d read sometimes they bury corpses in socks, and I got him a pocket square for no reason except it might have pissed him off.

Lucille didn’t even go into the mortuary. So I did. Before I handed over the suit, I put a quarter in the pants pocket along with a note I scribbled on the back of a receipt. 

I wasn’t planning on attending the funeral. Would he even want me there? Lucille said she couldn’t go without me, so I picked her up and drove us together, not talking, just listening to a playlist he’d made me when we were first going out. "A Whiter Shade of Pale." "Ashes to Ashes." "The Sweetest Goodbye." "Save the Last Dance for Me." It was a bad choice, in retrospect.

Afterwards, I told myself I’d forget him. I almost had, hadn’t I? I’d been moving on. There was no reason really for me to mourn an ex. He wasn’t special, was he? He was simply the first one of mine who had died.

A few weeks later, he showed up at Joe’s.

Wearing his suit, jacket off, shirt open. He stood at the far corner of the room in his stockinged feet, and I caught my breath, looked away, thinking I was hallucinating, looked back and he was still there.

He came towards me, and it was obvious by the way the others moved around him that nobody else could see him. I sat down in the darkest booth by myself, and he slid in opposite from me. The first thing he said was, “I’m sorry.”

“You should be.”

“I know.”

“Why’d you do it?” I asked.

He shrugged. “We were…”

“Happy?” I demanded.

“Boring.”

“Oh, my god,” I said. “I can’t believe you. We were BORING? We were happy, man. Do you really not know what happy feels like?”

“Yeah, but then she …”

“What? What could she possibly have done?”

“She just sort of looked at me.”

“That’s how she looks at guys. She’s literally over there,” I pointed, “looking at some other guy the same exact way.”

“I know. We only lasted a few weeks. I was going to come back…”

“Like hell you were.”

“Well, I was going to try.”

I bit my lip and stared at him. He wasn’t gross or gory like I thought he might be. He was Thad. Dead, for sure. But Thad with his rumpled hair and star-light eyes and strong jaw and a quarter that danced between his fingers. The quarter I’d slid into his pocket with the note about one last dance.

“Do you want to?” he asked, and he motioned to the jukebox.

“It will look weird, won’t it?” I asked. “You and me dancing, but people only seeing me.”

“That’s what you’re worried about? How it will look? Not that a dead man is sitting across from you, talking to you.”

“I don't really think you’re here is all.”

“That’s not true. You know I’m here.” He put his hand on mine. His was cold but not unpleasant.

And he was right. He seemed to be very much here, but when I glanced to our left, I could see in the reflection in the mirror over the bar that I was sitting by myself.

“What if you put the quarter in the slot,” he said, “and then come back here in the corner, and we dance very slowly right there where the light is out.”

“Seems like a lot of work for a dance,” I said.

“You don’t know how far I came to be here.”

I took the quarter.

On my way to the jukebox, I sashayed past Pete, who tried to grip me by the hips and pull me close. I darted around Sandy and her fella-of-the-moment. I ducked by Lucille, who looked like she was three sheets past three sheets.

I slid the coin in the machine, pressed the buttons for our song, and made my way back to the booth, half thinking it would be empty. That my brain was playing a game. But no. Thad was there, messing with the pocket square.

When the music started, he stood and took me in his arms. We made our way to the most secluded part of the bar, and I was sure that if anyone looked my way, they’d think I was as gone as Lucy. Drunk dancing my worries away. But I was in Thad’s arms, and he was kissing me.

“We buried you,” I said when we parted.

“Not deep enough.”

“But you are dead,” I said. 

“Yeah.” His sigh was a sigh of loss and longing, of every fucked up thing he’d ever done, and all the regret. 

“I really did love you,” I told him.

“I know it.”

“And you broke my heart.”

“I know that, too.”

We danced a little longer. He had his chin against the top of my head, and we fit the way we always did.

He said, “Are you angry at me?”

“It’s weird,” I said, and moved back to look up at him. “I’m not. I was. I thought you were a dip. You broke up a perfectly happy house. But when I found out you stepped in front of that…”

“Pushed.”

“What?”

“She pushed me.”

“She pushed you in front of a bus?”

“Yeah.”

I stared over at the redhead canoodling with some schmo who didn’t know he was kissing a killer. And then I looked back up at Thad.

“I’d told her I was going to get you, win you, beg you, and we were standing near the street, and she pushed me and I stumbled in front of the bus, and she disappeared into the crowd before anyone saw.”

That tracked for some reason. “Should I do something?” I asked. “Tell someone?”

He shook his head. “She’ll get hers,” he said, and it sounded as if he knew something I didn’t.

We danced some more. It was strange, but when he held me, I understood why he had left. We had become boring. What I’d taken for security was complacency. What I’d accepted as two people who had found each other and were on their road to rockers on a front porch had been frightening to a man who craved adventure.

“Why’d you come back?” I asked him when the song ended. “What do you want from me?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I just wanted you to know.”

His eyes were wet. Mine were, too. I motioned to the bar and asked if he wanted a drink.

“Dead men can’t buy drinks,” he said. 

“Do you want a sip of mine, then?”

We sat in the booth side by side this time until closing. He kissed the liquor off my lips and held my hand and let my warmth soothe him. And when the bartender flashed the lights, he kissed me one last time and said, “I have to go.”

“I know.”

“But any Friday you want to dance, I’ll be here. With your quarter.”

“What’s going to happen to me?” I asked softly, since he’d seemed to know Sandy’s future.

He brushed my hair out of my eyes. “You’re going to be fine.”

“Really? Because I don’t feel fine.”

“I promise,” he said. And I thought of the way we’d sometimes danced in our socks on the kitchen floor, late at night, goofy with one another. Him in sweats and no shirt. Me in a long tee. We would put on an old tape and slide across the linoleum.

Had I taken him for granted?

“No,” he said, obviously reading my thoughts. “You didn’t. It was me. People are … flawed.” He said the words as if he wasn’t one of us anymore. Which made sense, seeing as how when I looked out the window, I only saw the ghost of my own reflection.

He laced his fingers with mine, and I could feel every single emotion he was feeling. The blue-tinged pain and the golden need for me to forgive him.

Could I?

Had he been alive, I would still have hated him. But with him dead like that, I said what I’d written to him in the note I’d tucked into his pocket, “I’ll always save the last dance for you.” Then I kissed him one last time and walked out of the bar and into the coolness of two a.m. A pocket square in my hand.