Bone Dance Read Free

liked the sound of the word.
    â€œBecause those first people, they buried their most revered in the highest places. Right beneath us rest the bones of a medicine man. Or maybe a great chief! Or my name isn’t Thomas LaFrenière.” He paused dramatically. Lonny leaned against him and looked up into his face.
    Pop chuckled, reached down, and tugged the cap brim over Lonny’s eyes. “Let’s go home now,” he said, “and see that mother of yours. If we stay away too long, we might make her mad at us men.”
    â€œSo, my babe,” she said when he and Pop scuffed up the porch steps, knocking mud off their boots, “how was that? Did you like it? Come here.” She pulled him onto her lap, tickling his ear.
    â€œIt was like that time I saw the light on the trees!” he told her excitedly. “That’s
just
how it felt!”
    One day, back in the city, she’d told him that if you settled down and were very quiet, you could see light come right out and dance on the branches after the long, hard winter. “Mmm-hmm, really, I wouldn’t lie to you. See that tree, now?” She pointed out past the little south-facing window of their tiny apartment. “Sit down and stare real hard at it.”
    He sat down on the floor with his hands in his lap, just like they did on
Sesame Street,
and then he stared hard at the tree. His eyes made big tears from concentration, and just when he was ready to give up, she said, “Keep looking,” from the sofa where she sat folding socks and little shirts. He kept looking, to please her. And then the bare limbs of that spring tree
did
begin to shimmer with dancing light! With points and beads and ripples of pale gold that slowly bleached out and filled his eyes.
    A year after she married Pop, his mom, glowing and big and beautiful, went into the hospital to give birth to his baby sister. She came home empty-armed and sad. The light went out around her. He was eight years old and had never before been to a funeral.
    He crept into Pop’s arms. It was a cold spring day. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” Pop said over and over again. “We’ll be all right. Things will be okay again.”
    And, after a while, they were. Wild, blond ex-hippie Deena came into their yard. She appeared, a month later, in June, on a chestnut red horse. She slipped off the animal’s back, extended her tanned hand to Lonny’s mom, and said, “I’m Deena. I live down the road. It’s time we met.”
    â€œDeena.” Pop, coming up from the barn, looked at her in stunned surprise. “Thought you ran off to Calgary.”
    She flushed, and Lonny thought she was beautiful. “Been back over a month,” she said. “Couldn’t stay in the city a minute longer. Got restless again. DiscoveredI couldn’t breathe. So I guess this is going to be my home after all.”
    â€œThat’s good,” said Pop, and a little current, like the flutter of invisible wings, flew between them, then vanished.
    A big freckly grin now covered Deena’s face. “Didn’t you hear? My uncle died and left me a pile of money. I just bought the old café in town. And who might you be?” She tucked her strong, lemony, horsey-smelling fingers under Lonny’s chin. Then she turned her eyes back to Lonny’s mom. “I don’t suppose there’s a person in this community who hasn’t heard about your loss. I hear a good eighty percent turned up for the funeral. That’s some outpouring of love. But I sure am sorry for what you must be going through.” Her boots were the same shiny color as her horse, who now arched its neck and nudged her shoulder.
    Lonny’s mom turned her face away. He and Pop stood looking at her, caught in their desperate hope for some happy response. In that instant he knew two things: that they both loved her beyond measure, and that their lives were spun