Lost in Thought
an excerpt

Well Merle certainly didn’t go to the men’s room, thought Doreen. She grabbed her beer and went looking for him. Following the direction of the music, she headed down the hall, past the restrooms to the banquet room at the back of the café. She stopped, dumbfounded in the doorway with her jaw hanging open. There was Merle fitted out in a top hat and tails, his immaculate fingers caressing the keys of a baby grand piano.
“If you do that long enough, your face will freeze like that,” quipped Merle as he continued playing. “Come in and sit. I don’t mind an audience.”
His voice echoed quietly over the music breaking Doreen’s trance. She closed her mouth then decided she needed another pull on the beer just for her nerves. She found an empty crate and drug it over nearer to the piano. Not even her grandfather had ever played with such emotion and finesse as Merle. An auto mechanic! Her beer forgotten, she listened.
There was something about Merle as he played that felt so familiar to Doreen, like listening to a child’s voice and hearing hints of their parent’s voice in it. Or catching an odor on the breeze and getting an incomplete flash of memory. Whatever she thought she saw or heard it was gone too quickly.
Merle finished with a diminuendo that was barely more than a whisper and Doreen exhaled slowly when she realized that she’d been holding her breath. Fearful at breaking the final silence, she just stared at him and raised her eyebrows questioningly.
“Where did I ever learn to play like this? And why am I a mechanic in a little hole-in-the-wall town off the beaten path on a slow track to nowhere? And why the get-up?” Merle queried for her. She nodded her head emphatically and took another drink from the bottle.
Merle took off his hat, twirled it between his hands and set it on the piano bench next to himself. He ran his hand up the keys and down again and banged the cover down causing Doreen to start in surprise and squeak, “Awk!”(too much time spent alone with only a parrot for company?) Merle stretched out his hand to her and in reply to his own questions said, “Doreen, let’s dance. I’d rather not answer those questions right now. And besides, as long as I’m wearing the outfit, we might as well get my money’s worth out of it.”
As he swept her into his arms, he tapped his left foot on a pedal near the piano. It sprang to life, playing George Gershwin’s “American in Paris” suite as Merle deftly led Doreen across and around and back and forth the dusty, scuffed floor. The oddest thing about it--odder than a grand piano in the back of a greasy spoon café, odder than a mechanic in a tuxedo, even odder than dancing to Gershwin at 1 in the morning was the fact that Doreen had never danced one step before in her life. Doreen had lost her right leg in the car crash that also took her parents. The Sisters had tried to encourage her and the Mercy Fund had paid for her prosthetic leg as a child, but she never had the courage to attend any of the Saturday afternoon dances at the Hall. She could only live vicariously through her friends as they chattered energetically about the boys they’d partnered with that afternoon. It was a lonely youth she spent wearing thick, dark leggings and sensible shoes. But look at her now, virtually floating across the floor, twirling and dipping as Merle’s hands and feet directed.
“Doreen, you old peg-leg! How’s it feel to ‘trip the light fantastic’?”asked Merle gleefully, a grin wider than the state of Nebraska splitting his face.
Doreen gasped. He’d discovered her secret. “How did you find out?”
“The parrot was a dead give away. Deep down you really are a pirate. Doreen, you have the guts to be anything you want to be and the critics be damned! Take the world by storm. Forget the past and charge into the future with swords flashing and guns blasting. Your parents knew you could do it and so did your grandfather. I know because I was his student. He talked about you many times. He told me that you had a natural sense of rhythm and an ear for music that was like none he’d ever witnessed in a child before. I was sitting in the audience during your grandfather’s last concert when he received the news of the accident and then collapsed backstage. The day your parents died they had a surprise planned for you after the concert. They’d enrolled you in Bob & Curtsy’s Classical School of Ballroom Dancing. When you didn’t show up at the studio that day, your name was removed from the enrollment and no one even bothered to make a phone call to find out what happened to you.
Doreen was breathless from more than just keeping up with Merle. His revelation was overwhelming as she tried to backtrack through her memory and place Merle in there somewhere.
“Your car’s done. You can get back on the road in the morning.” And Merle gave her one more slow, graceful spin and released her from his arms. He gave her a gracious and dignified bow, then picked up his hat from the piano and strolled out the door whistling softly.