7. Chapter Seven
Chapter Seven
Honey
He shows up four days later with two cups of coffee and no real reason to be here.
I hear the car on the gravel and raise my attention from the bench.
Through the west window I watch him unfold himself out of the sedan and duck to retrieve something from the passenger side, two paper cups, held carefully, and I have enough time to take off my work apron and hang it on the hook before he reaches the door.
I open it before he knocks.
He holds up one of the cups like an explanation.
“I was driving past a coffee place,” he says.
“There’s no coffee place on this road.”
“There’s one about four miles that way.” He nods back toward the county road. “I took the long way.”
I take the cup because it would be strange not to, and because I’ve been drinking the same pot of coffee since seven this morning and it’s now close to noon.
He ducks through the doorframe and comes in, and the workshop does what it did the first time, the space seeming to recalibrate around someone it wasn’t built for.
He looks around without touching anything. His gaze goes to the piece on the bench, the quilt-pattern commission, and then to the repair piece at the far end: the inherited dulcimer, waiting for me to decide whether the final varnish coat has cured enough to call it done.
“Not working on yours yet,” I say. “Still have one ahead of you.”
He nods easily, not bothered, and moves toward the repair piece the way he moved toward the display dulcimer during his first visit—with actual attention rather than the performance of it.
“May I?”
I nod. He sets his coffee on the far end of the workbench—the end with nothing on it without me having to tell him to be careful.
He picks up the dulcimer with both hands, careful about the weight, and holds it in the light from the window.
His hands are… I’ve thought about his hands since the consultation, the contradiction of them, and watching him hold this small, old instrument is not making that easier.
He turns it slowly, his thumb reading the surface.
“What happened to it?” he asks.
“Gouge in the top. Three inches, ran with the grain.”
He finds the repair without me pointing to it; I can tell by the slight pause, his thumb moving almost imperceptibly. “I can barely see it.”
“You’re not supposed to.”
“How old is it?”
“About a hundred years. Client’s grandmother played it every Sunday for most of her life.”
He pauses, eyes narrowed in thought. “That’s a lot of Sundays to carry around in a piece of wood.”
This stops me. The specific way he said it, not sentimental, just accurate. The thing I’d thought when the client first brought it in and hadn’t been able to put into words. He’s not performing thoughtfulness; he’s just—there. Present in the way some people are present, without trying.
“My grandmother played,” I say. I didn’t plan to say it. “It was woven into the fabric of my childhood. She taught me when I was seventeen.”
He sets down the inherited dulcimer with the same care he picked it up and looks at me. That direct look he has, the one without an agenda behind it. “What happened when you were seventeen?”
I shift my weight off my left side—the adjustment so automatic I don’t register it until I see his eyes follow the movement. He notes it without commenting, the same way he found the end of the workbench with nothing on it without being told.
“I was a gymnast,” I say. “Elite level, competitive from when I was eight. I was good.” I say this the way my grandmother taught me to say true things. Without apology. Without performance. “When I was seventeen, I had a hip injury that ended that.”
“Career-ending.”
“Completely.” I drink some of the coffee. It’s good—actually good coffee, not what I’ve been drinking. “After I got over the shock, the anger, and some of the bitterness, I figured I should take up a more sedentary hobby.” I pause. “That’s how it started.”
He’s quiet, then asks, “How old was your grandmother?”
“In her seventies at the time. She lived to eighty-one. She was the most patient person I’ve ever known. I don’t come by it naturally.”
The corner of his mouth twitches. “I wouldn’t have guessed that about you.”
“The patience or the not coming by it naturally?”
“The not coming by it naturally. You seem like someone who takes a lot of time with things.”
I think about the pages of structural calculations I worked on for his commission the morning after Patrice called. “Sometimes.”
He gazes at me with that direct look, then asks if he can look at the wood stock along the far wall.
I say yes and follow him over, pointing out the pieces that are the right type of wood and large enough for his project.
He inspects the boards with his full attention.
One hand runs along the edge of a spruce board, not checking it exactly, more like feeling what it’s telling him.
“This one,” he says.
I examine the board he’s stopped at. Straight grain across the full width, tight and even, no runout. The kind of top that will open up over years of playing and get richer the more it’s used. It’s the one I would have chosen.
“Good eye,” I say.
He looks at me. “Or good luck.”
“Could be both.”
He picks up the board and holds it the way he held the inherited dulcimer—lightly, aware of what it is. “What am I listening for?”
“Tap it. Center of the board, one knuckle.”
He does. The tone that comes back is clear and even, a good sustain.
“That’s what you want,” I say. “A board that already knows how to sing.”
He taps it again, listening. Sets it back carefully. “I’ll trust you on the rest.”
We stay at the wall a few minutes longer—I show him the walnut I have in stock for the back and sides, explain what the figure in the grain means for how the finished instrument will look in different light. He asks good questions.
By the time he leaves, I’ve talked more than I normally talk during a client visit. I notice this standing in the workshop doorway watching his car go around the curve in the drive.
Then I go back inside and cross to the far end of the workbench where he set his cup down without leaving a ring.
The last person I let in here, into this part of things, the grandmother and the dulcimer and what the hip injury actually cost, had been kind about it in the beginning.
When it was fresh and required kindness.
He was less interested once it stopped being temporary and became the permanent condition of things.
The way I have to shift my weight when my hip is hurting and the cold mornings and the career that wasn’t coming back.
He left about six months after my injury. I understood it.
What I drew from it was less useful: the quiet conclusion, built up slowly over months, that the version of me the injury had left behind was something a person could tolerate for a while, but not choose to stay for.
I’ve never said that out loud. I don’t intend to.
It didn’t mean I was in a hurry to repeat the experiment.
I uncover the fretboard with its half-finished diamonds and pick up the burning pen.
Later, when I go inside for the night, I make tea with the image of large green hands clutching two steaming cups of coffee.