Chapter One
~*~
For her to have suddenly imagined dancing—and to imagine being dipped, no less—in the middle of Bro Brown’s Burgers and Malts? Oh, mercy. That had been silly.
Vicky Phillips was still at Bro Brown’s now on this Saturday afternoon, seated in a booth, sipping a strawberry ice cream soda from a tall glass. The height of lunch hour was over, so the crowd in here was light. Music was swinging from the jukebox on one side of the room, but Vicky barely heard it, her mind passing through belated thoughts. Belated memories of a pair of noisy children, running around outside together.
She reached up to touch one side of her honey brown face, feeling the pleasant warmth those memories caused. In a way they never had before.
Her daydreaming carried on in a forward direction until two of her girlfriends arrived at Bro Brown’s.
“Hey, Vicky!” Berta and Evie waved at her before the two of them went up to the front counter to make their orders. The girls would surely be brimming with chitchat once they joined Vicky at her table, and she’d best be ready to chitchat back. Any odd silence from her, and her friends were bound to start asking questions. Then Vicky would be likely to blurt the news about an, um, incident that had taken place here, not too many minutes ago.
If the incident could even be called news. It might not have been anything after all. Maybe it wouldn’t have felt like it could be something, if not for a (coincidental?) conversation Vicky had been a part of, a few months back.
See, somehow a certain subject had come up around the breakfast table at the Phillips family’s house one Sunday morning. Vicky’s father had been in one of his jaunty moods, saying at one point in the discussion, “He doesn’t have to know how to dance. A man just has to make sure he picks a woman who knows how. Then when they’re on the dance floor, while she’s doing her thing, all he has to do is get a little low and snap his fingers to her feet.” He lowered one hand and threw down some upbeat snaps near his side. “Makes it look like somethin’.”
Vicky’s older brother, Roy, had snickered. “Oh, so while Mom was busy bopping around and kicking up her heels and everything, you used to just stand there snapping at her?”
“Hey.” A smirk quirked up the dark, trim mustache on their father’s mahogany face. “I didn’t say I didn’t know how to dance. The band would be wore out by the time I was done on the floor. Still happens when I take your mother out. Ask anybody.”
Vicky’s mother cut into the conversation after crunching into a strip of bacon. “All right now, saints. Is this really the subject we need to have on our minds right before church?”
“Hm? Why not?” her husband wanted to know. “Don’t we talk about the Bible at church? They danced in the Bible, Sister Phillips. Amen?”
“No ‘amen’ to that. That’s not the kind of dancing you’re going on about.”
“No? You don’t know what all their dances looked like in the Bible. Who’s to say that sometimes God’s children weren’t jukin’?”
“Otis!” Vicky’s mother squeaked at her husband, her eyes popping wide with the appropriate degree of Sabbath Day disapproval.
“Marion?” he addressed his wife in return with an innocent lift of his eyebrows, until her light brown cheeks twitched with what was, no doubt, loosely locked-up laughter.
Vicky swallowed a bite of her scrambled eggs, holding up a hand to get her father’s attention. “Wait, Dad, come on. A guy won’t get by for that long on the floor if he can’t dance. What if his girl wants him to pick her up and swing her around and stuff?”
“Ain’t hard to swing a girl around,” her father claimed. “He can even do a test run beforehand. Any old day when he sees her, he can bump right smack into her, catch her before she falls. See what her weight feels like. Then he’ll know he can swing her.”
Roy snorted.
Vicky turned amused eyes on her mother. “Is that what Dad did to you? Ran up and barreled into you one day, then the next day he asked you to dance and swung you around?”
Not meeting her daughter’s eyes, Vicky’s mother kept her gaze leveled on her now grinning
husband sitting across the breakfast table from her. After some slow chewing of her bacon, she answered, “No, Victoria. Your father did not.” She reached out to pick up her cup of coffee. “It was me who used to swing him around.”
By the end of that Sunday morning exchange with the family, Vicky had been laughing.
Now, these months later, it would take a tad of extra effort for her to laughingly settle into an afternoon chat with her friends. To move on, sort of, from today’s earlier, um, incident.
This day was the last Saturday of summer break before Vicky’s junior year of high school would start. She, Berta, and Evie had planned ahead to meet here at Bro Brown’s, a spot located on Main Street in West Hill, a community nicknamed the “Black Diamond district.”
As Berta and Evie were approaching Vicky’s table with their own tall glasses to sip from and a side of potato fries to share, Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five jumped onto the jukebox, urging everybody in the place to “Let the Good Times Roll.”
Berta harrumphed as she slid into the booth beside Vicky, saying, “Uh huh. If they really wanted the good times to roll on for us, they’d push school back a few weeks. Or months. Till after Christmas.”
Evie slid into the booth on the opposite side of the table. “I’m glad school’s starting up,” she admitted, her voice dropping a notch with her eyes. “It’ll help give my family something else to talk about at the dinner table.” ...
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