Page 57 of Home Ice

Marta let go of my hands.

“You’ll dance the slow one later. The slow one has a turn, and you’re not ready yet, but you will be by then.” She looked past my arm and raised one eyebrow.

“Go get coffee,” she said. “Do you know that one? Standing by the urn?”

I turned around and froze.

At the coffee urn, in a quarter-zip and khakis, holding a paper cup, was Pratt.

I crossed the hall, certain that at some distance the picture would resolve into a stranger who looked a lot like Pratt. It didn’t. The picture remained the same. It was Pratt, calmly watching the dancers and drinking coffee.

“Hey,” I said.

“Rafe.” There was no surprise in his voice.

“I didn’t know you were Hungarian.”

“I’m not, but who doesn’t love folk dancing?”

That was all he said. He took a sip of his coffee and went back to watching the floor. Nobody around me was paying attention to him. He was part of the community.

Varga came up to my opposite shoulder. “He comes every year. Nobody invited him the first time. He was just here, and now he’s like a load-bearing column.”

“Where’s Sully?” I asked Pratt.

“He works on Saturdays.”

The band took a break, and the stage stood empty except for the instruments. I walked closer to the stage to look at the cimbalom. Strings crossing over each other, almost like the inside of a piano, and the wood underneath them glowed.

I took my phone out and took a photo without thinking about it.

Then the food line opened, and Varga gestured for me to join it. I never got to the end. I was maybe four people back when a woman in an apron cut me out of it, walked me to a long table, and set a full plate in front of me.

It was a delicious chicken dish, and Varga explained later that it was paprikash served over dumplings. The woman patted my shoulder twice and left. Nobody had asked if I was hungry.

The dumplings were the best thing I’d eaten since Sunday at the Gregorys’.

“Nokedli,” Varga said when he sat down across from me with his own plate. “You’re about to hear about the nokedli. They are like spätzle, but twice as good. Wait for it.”

I didn’t have to wait long. A second woman stopped at my shoulder, looked at my plate, and said something in Hungarian that made the first woman, three tables away, turn all the way around.

“Ilona made the batch you’re eating,” Varga translated. “Kati made the other batch. Whatever happens next, keep eating.”

It sounded as if Kati had asked a question of Ilona. She fired back an answer without breaking stride, and two tables of people laughed. They looked at me.

“Very good,” I said, with my mouth half full, and both Ilona and Kati nodded.

I ate everything on the plate, and when Ilona came by and added a second helping without slowing down, I ate that too.

The musicians came back from their break. The floor began to fill.

Marta was watching me from the edge of the floor. She wasn’t standing, and she’d set up two folding chairs at the side. They were out of the traffic, and she was sitting in one of them with her hands folded in her lap. She patted the empty one beside her.

“Sit,” she said. “This one we don’t dance. This one we talk.”

The chairs were close enough to the stage that nobody else would hear what we said.

“My husband danced like Lucas,” she said. “Terrible. Forty-one years, and terrible the whole time. He danced like a man carrying furniture.” She turned to look at me. “But he never missed a dance.”