Dewey's Nine Lives

They walked quietly to the dance floor. She was smaller than he expected. The top of her head came only to the middle of his chest, and yet they seemed to fit together as they began to move silently across the floor. She was quiet, focused on something else perhaps, but when she looked into his face, her eyes seemed to take him in, to linger for a chorus, and then, reluctantly, to look away. When he swept her across the dance floor, she didn’t feel like an obstacle. There was no resistance, no weight. There was only the feel of her warm hand, and the memory of her eyes staring into his own.

“I’m Glenn,” he said.

“I’m Vicki,” she replied.

He swept her around the dance floor a few more times, hardly noticing the sea of gray swirling around them. “Do you live around here?”

“In Spencer,” she said.

When the song ended, he slipped his hand behind her waist. If she wanted to leave, he would let her, but she didn’t. She leaned against his arm, allowing him to hold her. Somewhere beyond them, in another world, the drummer beat time, and when the music started again, Glenn led her easily around the dance floor, holding her close as the band played something he never wanted to end.

“I had a good night,” he told Rusty, when he finally got home. “A real good night.”

The big cat looked at him, his eyes hooded and half awake, and meowed for some food.

Part II

I’ve always loved to dance. When I was a kid, Mom and Dad taught us to dance to the rhythms of the old radio in the family room of our farmhouse outside Moneta, Iowa. When I was nineteen and working in a box factory in Mankato, Minnesota, I danced my toes off every night. Dancing introduced me to my first husband, and it helped me through the dark days after my divorce. As a single mother attending college for the first time at the age of thirty, I didn’t have time for so-called “leisure” pursuits, but dancing was never simple leisure to me. Dancing, to me, was essential. When I heard the music, when I got up to dance, I felt like myself—the good self, not the self that had been through six surgeries from a botched hysterectomy and spent almost a decade married to an alcoholic. Even on the darkest nights, after tucking my daughter into bed and scrubbing down the pots and writing that last class paper, I often went into the kitchen, put on a record, and danced all by myself.

I danced all through my years at the Spencer Public Library. After closing, Dewey and I danced in the library, just the two of us, hopping around between the books. At public events, I was known to cut loose with my male friends and my dates. I went to singles dances, too, although never in Spencer. It didn’t seem right, somehow, for the town librarian to be seen cozying up to some man on a dance floor. People, as they say, would talk.

So I went out of town: the famous Roof Garden dance hall twenty miles away in the Iowa Lake Country; my friend Trudy’s favorite spots in Worthington, Minnesota; the more respectable clubs in Sioux City. I dated, but the relationships never worked out. One suitor showed me his divorce certificate on the first night. That should have been a tip-off. The next day, his wife called and threatened my life. Apparently, her husband had the same name as his uncle. The man had shown me the papers from his uncle’s divorce.

The Cowboy, a Sioux City blind date, drove me through the pens where the cows waited for slaughter because he thought they were beautiful in the moonlight. Then he took me to his house and showed me how to make bullets. A man from Minneapolis invited me for a weekend on his sailboat. A sudden storm blew in, and I got so seasick I vomited on my dress. The next morning, he told me his favorite place in the world was some spot in Italy. He asked my favorite place. I was in my thirties, and I’d never been anywhere but Iowa and Minnesota. I knew that relationship wasn’t going to work out, either.

Not that I was focused on having a man. I had fun when they were around, especially the dancing, but I didn’t spend my nights pining for them. I was too busy enjoying what I had: a meaningful job, a loyal family, great friends, and a wonderful library cat named Dewey Readmore Books. Sure, I was basically the person that answered his fan mail, but Dewey never treated me like the help. We were partners. I wasn’t giving up anything by building my life around that partnership, and especially that job. I was gaining a life of contentment and laughter, a life where I didn’t have to scatter my attention or waste my energy on something other well-meaning (and nosy) people told me I was supposed to want. Instead, I got to focus on what was important: supporting my daughter, caring for my parents, establishing deep friendships, and using my talents to build an institution that would provide for the citizens of Spencer. I was extremely happy as a mother and librarian by vocation, and a cat lover and a dancer by habit. I didn’t want to be a girlfriend, too.

Then Dewey died.