At home it was a different kind of dance, Jesse cleaning the apartment like a maid gone mad, washing each dish as soon as it got dirty, sweeping crumbs from the kitchen floor. He was about to drive me crazy. I couldn’t even throw my leotards onto the bed anymore, without him coming up behind me and folding them neat. I’m glad I didn’t smoke, or he’d have been forever emptying the ashtrays. And wouldn’t you know, when he wasn’t cleaning or exercising or straightening up, he sat perched like a trapped bird searching my windows, which were clean now on both sides, thanks to him. What that man wouldn’t have done.

I teased him to get his sense of humor back. I tried out something new, a pas de deux with sounds and steps. “Eh-yah?”

“Caroom-boom clack,” he answered.

“Eh-yah.”

“Caroom-boom clack.”

I grabbed his hands and pulled him around and around and we were kids again playing Ring-Around-the-Rosy and Little Sally Walker. I spun and he spun and we all fell down. The soles of our feet came together. We stretched long, low, and wide from the hips, then sat up like chocolate Buddhas, contracting stomach and chest in and out, in and out, two, three. I moved right into a lotus position he couldn’t do. I had him then. But he went off to the kitchen and started making dinner.

Soon I was sitting at the prettiest table. A vase of yellow freesias, red paper napkins, and Aunt Lois’s glass salad bowl dug out from a closet somewhere. Well, a man like that was a find. I hugged him good and he hugged me. This time I had to tell him about Phillip. Clear things up before I lost my way. Ruella, girl, how do you always get tangled up in these things?

“Jesse, you’re just like my brother.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“I already have a brother. His name is Phillip.”

“So do I, only his name is Charlie and we can’t stand each other.”

“Well, Phillip and I have had our differences,” I said, trying to ease up on what was really on my mind. “He’s in jail now, busted for dealing in heroin.”

“Oh,” said Jesse with a scared look, like he’d got mixed up in some other mess.

“I’m not into drugs,” I said. “Not me, chile. And I’m only bringing him up to say, well, I have a brother, Jesse. What I don’t have is a lover.” And there I sat with my mouth hanging open, like the words just fell out on their own. Jesse looked at me and didn’t say a thing. So I grinned and pulled my mouth in shut. Jesse chuckled, laughed. Then I started laughing for no reason at all, just seeing him laugh which made me laugh some more. Then we stopped. Just like that. I figured I could give him something Metro didn’t have. If he wanted to call me Rooms, well, he should know what spaces I really had. How much there really was in me. I never said I was pretty. But I have my good points.