Esther Cohen
Esthercohen.com
Delores and John met at a dance at one of the Wednesday Irish music nights at Gavin’s in East Durham. Delores was not Irish or Catholic, but she often said there wasn’t a human being on this entire planet who didn’t want to dance the minute they heard Irish music. And she’d married an Irish man once. Diamud was husband number one. She met him in a bar when she was just 15 and he was 28. He was the handsomest man on the planet, but not the best husband. Still they had good children, and stayed friendly enough.
John qualified as a genuine Irish Catholic. His family was from County Cork, and he was just a boy when they moved to Queens. All these years later, he still had his beautiful brogue.
Delores could have been a professional dancer. She moved with ease, and everyone had their eyes on her because of some quality she had, not just beauty, not just grace, but a kind of magic, the magic some people intrinsically have.
Wonderful, and rare.
Age hadn’t hindered her one bit, and she steamrolled over any ailments she had, and just kept dancing.
Two years ago, on a particularly lively Wednesday night, Delores was dancing dancing dancing dancing with everyone in the room. A new man was there. Like everyone else, he came for the music. He smiled the kind of smile she hadn’t seen in years, and then, he asked her to dance.
There are moments in life – unpredictable and infrequent, when you feel something absolutely unexpected and actually wonderful. Sometimes it’s a trick to recognize when those moments happen but Delores, the most open person on the planet, was always waiting for magic. When John asked her to dance, she just knew. He did too.
She didn’t want to ever stop dancing.
Their first night together was one of those nights. They laughed a lot they drank a lot and they danced and danced.
And Delores, pursued all her life by more or less everyone she encountered, Delores was the one who actually said to John, “Please come home with me.”
He did not hesitate. And that first night, when everything worked the way it was supposed to, when life seemed like the real true miracle it can be, that first night was entirely perfect.
It was summer, so their days together were long, and warm. Dancing, love-making, meals and drinks.
They met every Wednesday, and began their dates with dancing.
Delores told him as much as she could about her life: her childhood, her marriages, her career forays. And John met Annie, her longtime best friend.
He met some of her children too. She brought him to her grandson’s soccer games in the East Durham field behind the school, and to her daughter’s
42nd birthday party at a new hamburger spot in Greenville.
He told her about his children too, who all lived far away: a son in Oregon, with a food truck in Portland. A boating son in Maine. A daughter, married, with two young children, living with her husband in New Hampshire. He told her about his work as an engineer on bridges, and about his difficult childhood. His mother died when he was six, and his father, a distant man, a car mechanic who was happiest, said John, with his head under the hood. His father remarried a woman named Pam who had 3 small children of her own. John didn’t like Pam very much .His father died a while ago, and although Pam was alive, he never saw her. Or her children either.
Delores thought she knew all she needed to know. She never thought, even once, to ask if he had a wife.
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