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and ask to hear again the story of Brown v. Board of Education .
    Except George. The first time I saw him stand at the barre in fifth position, I thought that maybe the spell had been broken. Maybe I had pushed all of the little lawyers from my body. Georgewas graceful and strong. He had a great understanding of music. Most of all, he possessed the single quality that allows boys to dance: He was completely impervious to teasing. When he was older and the boys on the football team said he was gay, George only smiled and winked at them. After all, he was dating every girl in town who possessed good posture and a pair of tights. By the time he was sixteen, he was teaching the introductory classes himself. He went to dance camps in the summer. He came to the studio at the crack of dawn to practice. Scouts from the big companies were coming to see him. George was going to be my legacy.
    Four children. Four lawyers. He waited a long time to tell me, and when he finally did, what could I say? I would rather see you be a dancer? I would rather see you in a career where you might hold on until you’re thirty-five if you don’t get knocked out by a case of tendinitis or a bad knee?
    “It’s not an either-or thing,” George said. “Just because I’m going to law school doesn’t mean I won’t still look great in tights.”
    “Sure,” I said, trying not to sound defeated. “You can still dance.”
    And he did. He kept on teaching the level-three class on Saturday morning. George loved level three. That’s where you start to relearn everything you already thought you knew cold. He took the prima seventh graders through the six positions over and over again. George was a real stickler for detail.
    But today was a Wednesday, not a Saturday, and this class wasn’t a level at all. It was only the bumblebees, and there George was, dancing the role of the grandest daisy in the bunch.
    “Aunt Taffy called,” he said to me over his shoulder and then threw in a grand jeté just to show off for the girls.
    “Roots in the ground, daisies,” I said. “Use your arms.”
    “She wanted me to tell you she’s on her way.”
    “She’s leaving Atlanta now?”
    George swung down from the waist, made a circle with his torso, and rose up again to the light. The girls followed him. I followed him. “No, no, no. She left at five o’clock this morning. She said she couldn’t sleep, anyway. She said the house stank of Uncle Neddy.”
    I felt a little chill. “So where was she calling from?”
    “She said she was right around the 40-85 split,” George said in an ominous voice.
    She was just outside of Durham. That gave me less than an hour if there was traffic, as little as forty minutes if the roads were clear.
    “I tried to put the house together. Woodrow said he’d get one of the drywall guys to run the vacuum. He said he’d let her in, of course, if you didn’t make it home in time.”
    “I can’t just walk out of here.” I clapped my hands. The girls looked up at me with that expectant expression so often seen on the faces of puppies. “Now your roots come up, all the way out of the ground. That’s right, now stretch up.”
    “I’ll cover this.”
    “You have school.”
    “Believe me, it’s easier to make up a day of law school than it is a day of dance class. I’ve read too far ahead, anyway. It’s hardly even interesting.” He turned his attention to the class. “Skip, daisies! Put your hearts into it! You’re the first daisies on the planet who are able to skip!” George set off in a slow skip and the girls followed him. They would have followed him out of the school, down the street, and into the river.
    “You’re saving my life.”
    “I’m saving my own life. I don’t want to have to listen to Taffy bemoan the fact that you weren’t even there to meet her. Stretch your stems. Long daisy stems!” George pushed his shoulders down and made his neck into something elegant and the little girls strained to