The Stand-In Waltz

About this book

Kasia Wójcik is eighteen, the best teacher at her grandmother's dance studio above a shuttered bakery in Cleveland's Slavic Village, and the author of its one rule: never date a student. She's leaving for Pittsburgh in August. Then Rafa Colón climbs the stairs in work boots. He's nineteen, he changes tires on Broadway Avenue, and he has twelve lessons to learn the waltz his dead father used to sing, so he can dance it with his sister at her wedding on September 16. He can't find the downbeat. He can't talk about his father. And Kasia's grandmother, for reasons she won't explain, has given him a price that makes no sense. Three years later, on a long October night, Kasia tells the story to the seventeen-year-old who has just confessed the same mistake - not to warn her, but to tell her what it cost.