“If I can do anything . . ,” I said.
Maggie smiled. “I know. Thanks.” She held both arms out a bit from her body and shook them. Then she started for the middle of the room. “Circle, everyone,” she called.
Mags took her usual place with her back to the wall, facing the door. Ruby slid in beside her as everyone else spread out. Taylor stopped to pull an elastic from her pocket and pull her red hair up into a high ponytail. Roma smiled at me and patted the air to her left. I took the empty space next to her.
Rebecca was already hurrying across the floor. She joined the circle beside me. “Hi, Kathleen,” she whispered.
“Hi,” I whispered back as Maggie started the warm-up.
“Have you gotten the rocking chair back together yet?” Rebecca asked. Her arms were swinging forward and back and the light sparkled off the diamond ring on her left hand.
I was happy that Rebecca and Everett were getting their happily ever after, even though it had taken close to fifty years for it to happen. And I had a permanent little bubble of warmth in my chest knowing that the cats and I had played a very tiny role in helping the two of them find their way back to each other, though I couldn’t imagine that it wouldn’t have happened anyway. As Ruby liked to say, “What’s meant to be will always find a way.” I wasn’t a big believer in fate, but in the case of those two, I was willing to make an exception.
Before I could answer Rebecca’s question, Maggie called across the circle to me, “Kathleen, bend your knees.”
I gave a melodramatic sigh and everyone laughed. It was a running joke in the class. I thought I was bending my knees. I was trying to bend my knees. It just seemed that my knees didn’t know that.
I got down a little lower to the ground and Rebecca gave me a sympathetic smile, the way she always did. “To answer your questions, yes and no,” I said, keeping my voice low.
“I’m sorry,” she said, not the slightest bit out of breath even though she was twice my age. “I’m not following you.”
I was already a tiny bit winded. I made a mental resolution to leave the truck at home more often and walk to the library. “I got the rocking chair all together okay, but it had a decided list to one side,” I said.
“Oh, dear,” Rebecca said, two frown lines appearing between her blue eyes. “Maybe Oren could help you.”
Oren Kenyon was a jack-of-all-trades. He’d duplicated the old trim for the library restoration and created the beautiful carved wooden sun that was over the entrance. If Marcus couldn’t fix the chair, maybe I would ask Oren.
“Marcus is going to try to put it together for me,” I said.
Rebecca beamed at me. “He’s a very nice young man,” she said, with a gleam in her eye that even with her gray hair made her look about as old as Taylor King. “I’m glad the two of you have become friends.”
“You’re as bad as Maggie,” I said.
Rebecca gave me a look that was all innocence. She was much better at it than either Owen or Hercules.
Marcus had figured out that Maggie had been trying to get the two of us together. I wondered if he knew that it seemed as though everyone else in town was trying to do the same thing.
Maggie worked us hard. By the time we did the entire form at the end of class, the neck of my T-shirt was wet with sweat. Some of my movements still needed more practice, especially Cloud Hands, but I could go all the way through all one hundred and eight movements of the form.
I walked over to Roma and Taylor, who were standing by the table while Roma made herself a cup of tea that smelled like cranberries and cinnamon. “I’m never going to be able to do that,” Taylor was saying as she shook her hair out of its ponytail.
“If you mean the entire form, yes, you will,” Maggie said, joining us. She’d peeled off her T-shirt to uncover the red and purple tie-dye tank she had on underneath. I was pretty sure Ruby had made it. “Everyone was where you are when they first started. You just take it a movement at a time.”
Taylor shook her head. She didn’t look convinced.
“It’s just like eating an elephant,” Ruby said, walking over to us as she pulled the elastics off her pigtails.
Roma frowned at her over the top of her teacup. “I don’t get what you mean,” she said. “How do you eat an elephant?”
Ruby grinned. “A bite at a time.”
Everyone groaned, and Ruby made a face at us. Then she turned to Taylor. “If you keep at it and you practice, you’ll get it all. Anytime you want to come over to my studio and practice with me, you can.”
“Really?” Taylor said. “Because I know my right hand isn’t, well, right when I do White Crane Spreads Wings.”
“Show me,” Ruby said, draping the towel around her neck. She looked at Maggie. “You don’t mind?”
Mags made a sweeping movement with one hand. “Go ahead.”
Taylor followed Ruby over to a spot near the middle of the studio.
Roma took another sip of her tea and turned to Maggie. “Do you have any idea what’s going to happen with the food tasting and the art show now that Mike Glazer is dead?”
Maggie shook her head. “I was telling Kathleen earlier that Liam was having a meeting with the others on the committee while we were doing class.” She glanced over at the clock above the door. “They’ve probably decided what to do by now.”
“You think they’ll go ahead?” Roma asked.
“With the show and the tasting?” Maggie said, grabbing a cup to make herself some tea. “I think they might as well. We were only a few days from it all coming together. I hate to see everyone’s hard work go to waste. As far as the pitch to the tour company, I think that’s done.” She reached for the box of chocolate-spice tea bags. “I don’t think it was going to work anyway, even if Mike hadn’t had a heart attack or whatever it was.”
For a moment I could almost feel the man’s cold skin under my fingers. I swallowed as my stomach tightened. “Why do you say that?” I asked.
Maggie dropped a tea bag into her cup and added hot water. The tea smelled delicious—like cloves and chocolate. “I hope Mike was welcomed by the light,” she said, “and I don’t like to be critical of someone who isn’t here to defend himself anymore, but most of the time, he acted like he thought we were all a bunch of small-town hicks.”
I thought about Burtis fingering the sledgehammer while Mike ranted at him and about Mary saying she was going to kick Mike’s backside between two light posts like a placekicker going for three points. Given what I suspected about how Mike Glazer had died, I didn’t like knowing how many people had disliked working with the man.
“I noticed that last night,” I said carefully.
“But maybe it was just that he knew what kinds of things his customers were looking for in a getaway,” Roma offered.
Maggie shook her head. “It was more than having high standards. I don’t have a problem with that. I have very high standards for how my art is displayed.” She sighed. “I got the feeling Mike thought we didn’t know how to do things properly, let alone well.”