Dance With Me Read Online Free PDF Page A

worked out. And “famous” had been one of his favorite adjectives and his highest goal.
    Now...
    He pulled off the road and parked the car where he could look out over the water, leaving the vehicle running, though he did turn down the heater fan so he could hear himself think. In afterthought, he turned off the radio as well. The past was starting to make him feel morose, so he thought about the present instead: about his mother's party and about Ed Maurer.
    The two made strange bedfellows, and for a moment Laurie smiled, imagining what his mother and Ed would look like in the same room together. Polished, china-beautiful Caroline Parker and big, brutish Ed Maurer. He imagined showing up at the party with him, of Ed in his workout clothes damp with sweat as he broadcast his crude humor, and he imagined his mother in her cream and beige pantsuit and pearls, slender hands folded together in front of her as she tried not to show how horrified she was. For a minute, Laurie wished he'd have asked Ed to be his date tonight instead of asking him to help with the ballroom dance class.
    Which was a flatly ridiculous thought, and it illustrated just how very much Laurie had lost his mind. Why would he bring Ed to his parents’ house? Why ? To be insulted by Ed in front of people he knew for a change? And why had he asked Ed to be his assistant in that ballroom class? Except that answer he knew. And as usual, it was Ed's fault.
    “What do you need?” he'd asked. And it had all sort of rolled together in Laurie's head and become the dance class. The class he'd taken because Maggie, his co-owner of the studio, had accidentally overbooked herself. He couldn't take her Irish class because that was quite likely the only dance style he didn't know. He would never have taught ballroom dancing voluntarily. He still wasn't sure why he'd let Maggie talk him into it at all.
    Very well, he knew that too: because she'd assured him it was “nothing.” She'd told him it was a bunch of old couples from her church wanting to be able to dance for a cruise and had regarded him as if he were very strange for thinking this would be anything but a walk in the park. And Laurie had truly thought after all this time it really wouldn't bother him, that teaching ballroom would be no big deal. But he'd been wrong. It had bothered him a lot, so much so that he'd started dreading Tuesday nights on Friday afternoon. He was a lousy ballroom teacher, and he went home and huddled under his comforter in the dark afterward. He was ramping himself into such a state that sparring with Ed was preferable to going to class.
    That, he knew, was how he'd descended into the madness which had led him to think having Ed as his partner would diffuse the situation. He'd thought, he supposed, that being angry at Ed would keep the ghosts at bay.
    Except it was a stupid idea on so many levels. Did he really want Ed Maurer there making snide remarks when he was already feeling vulnerable? This was to say nothing of what the Baptist blue-hair brigade would think of his dancing with a man, and Ed would probably join in their mockery with them. What the devil had possessed him? How had that ever, even in complete dementia, seemed like a good plan? This would be nothing but disaster. As Laurie stared out at the lake, he saw the future unrolling before him with horrible clarity.
    He reached for his phone and scrolled through his address book. Vicky answered on the third ring.
    “Hey, Laurie. What's up?”
    Laurie leaned back in his seat. “I'm at Lake Minnetonka on my way to one of my mother's parties.”
    She sighed wistfully. “Wish I were there with you and not buried in paperwork. Though I can't say I'd want to go visit your mother. You're going? Voluntarily?”
    “Command performance,” Laurie admitted. “She has ‘something to show me.'”
    “Uh-oh,” Vicky said. “Well, at least it won't be a blind date.”
    “I think I'd rather it was that.” Laurie rubbed his