Palmetto Moon by Kim Boykin

laughs. He looks into her face. God she’s beautiful. He wants to know her, know everything about her. “So, where are you from?”
    “I love this song.” She ignores the question and sways to the easy beat.
    He starts to ask again but gets distracted by her face, her smile, her fluid movements. “You want to dance?”
    She stops and blushes. “Here? Now?”
    “After the crab-cake contest. There’s a dance hall at the end of the street. I’ve been there a time or two; it’s a nice enough place.”
    The food is on the table too soon, and Frank can’t eat until he watches her judge it. Her lips part for the fork. No scrunching shoulders or blissful face. She rocks her head from side to side like they’re okay and eats. Frank’s so proud, he’s about to burst. If Vada Hadley doesn’t know anything else about him, she knows he’s a damn-fine cook.
    He inhales his food to get on with the date, to feel her swaying in his arms on the dance floor. She takes dainty bites like she’s in no hurry and sets her fork down.
    “Can I tell you something, Frank?” She looks at him with those blue eyes, and all he can do is nod. “I have a secret.”
    Frank has a secret, too. He’s fallen hard for Vada Hadley and her blue eyes, her soft pink lips that smile when she says his name. So damn hard. Could he possibly be the luckiest man in the world because she feels the same way?
    “You can tell me anything, Vada.”
    She picks up her fork again and smiles as she pushes the food around on her plate, and he is completely lost. “I need your help, Frank Darling.”
    This doesn’t sound like she’s going to tell him she loves him back, but she did say she needs him. Sort of. At least she needs his help.
    “Yes.”
    “What?” She blushes. “I haven’t even told you what I want.”
    “Whatever it is, yes. I’ll do it
.
I’d do anything for you.”
    “Really?”
    He runs his hand through his hair, amazed that it’s possible to go from feeling as old and codgery as Joe Pike this morning to being a lovesick boy. He weighs saying the words for fear she’ll think he’s moving too fast, that he’s not sincere. But Frank’s more sure of what he feels for her than he is of anything. “I’ll do anything you want me to. But honest to God, Vada, if you don’t hurry up and eat so I can hold you in my arms on the dance floor, I think I’m going to die.”
    She smiles at him and pushes her plate away like she’s ready to leave, too. Without looking at the tab, Frank throws too much money on the table. As they wind back toward the entrance, she reaches for his hand. “Night,” the cook snaps from the kitchen. When Frank asked him to turn Vada’s song up, he made no mention of the jarhead’s Semper Fi tattoo, like he might have if he wasn’t out on a date. He didn’t ask the cook if he’d been to war, so that he could tell Frank what he’d missed. Tonight is all about Vada Hadley.
    The old lady keeping the door of the dance hall takes Frank’s dime and nods them in. The dance floor is full, so many bodies jiving to a big-band tune, looking like one pulsing mass. A pretty brunette saunters up to Frank and asks if he wants to buy a dollar’s worth of tickets from her. Before he can say anything, Vada pipes up, but her voice can’t be heard above the music. The song tails off as the woman is leaning in closer to Frank so that he can see her wares. Frank loves the annoyed look on Vada’s face. She holds their clasped hands up for the woman to see.
    “Come on, honey,” the woman coos, “a little variety will only cost you ten cents a dance.”
    “He’s with me,” Vada says above the noise, and the woman gives her a drop-dead look and slithers over to another guy. Vada looks at Frank with steely blue eyes for confirmation.
    “
Yes, ma’am
.” They fold into the throbbing crowd and start moving as the band plays a snappy Dizzy Gillespie number. The other girls writhe around, sweating and red, but not Vada. Her