10. Chapter Ten
Chapter Ten
Honey
Monday morning, I make coffee, carry it to the workshop, and sit on the stool by the door, wanting to be in the space without working in it.
The dulcimer is on the bench where I left it Friday, angled perfectly to catch the morning light.
I tell myself I left it there on purpose. I don’t examine what that means.
Local pickups are one of my favorite things about this work.
Most of what I build goes into a box and gets shipped somewhere I’ll never see, to hands I’ll never meet.
When someone drives out, when I get to stand in the workshop and watch a person encounter the thing I made, that’s the part of this job that doesn’t feel like a job.
I always make good coffee on local pickup days.
I drink my coffee. The dulcimer is on the bench.
It looks fine, better than fine. A custom mountain dulcimer with a wider neck and adjusted fret spacing, built for specific hands, decorated with the flower from another world that its future owner described to me once in enough detail that I was apparently able to reproduce it across an entire soundboard.
Across an entire soundboard.
I set my coffee down.
From across the workshop, it reads as pink.
Not aggressively pink—pale, warm, the color I mixed carefully from his description, darker at the centers and lighter at the edges the way he said they were.
The velara cover the soundboard completely, each burned line giving the petals depth, the whole design sitting inside the wood rather than on top of it.
It is, technically speaking, the best decorative work I’ve ever done.
It is also, technically speaking, pink. Very.
He plays in public. At a bar. In front of people he knows.
I stand over it from three feet away, then from two, then from the angle he’ll see it when I turn it toward him. The flowers look back at me with complete indifference.
“I ordered a plain dulcimer,” I imagine him saying. Politely. The way a seven-foot orc is polite when a craftsperson has lost her mind all over his instrument.
He didn’t order this. He ordered a plain commission with a wider neck and adjusted fret spacing.
What he’s going to get is something that looks like a hillside in spring and will require him to explain it to everyone who sees him play it for the rest of his life.
On Monday morning, he’ll drive twenty-three miles to pick up an instrument covered in flowers from his home world that he never once asked me to put there.
I could make him another one. A plain one.
No charge, obviously—the flowers were my decision, my problem.
I’d need three weeks, but I have the templates now, the calculations are done.
It would be faster the second time. He ordered plain and I could still give him plain and everything that happened on this soundboard would be between me and the wood.
I pick up my coffee. Put it down. The crow up the hill is making its morning complaints at full volume.
Through the open workshop door, gold light stretches across the oaks, and the creek smell drifts through the screen.
The whole property settled into the kind of slow Missouri morning I grew up in and have never once gotten tired of.
His tires hit the gravel.
My stomach drops.
I hear the car slow and stop. The engine cut.
The door. I have approximately forty-five seconds before he reaches the workshop door, and I have not decided what I’m going to say.
Lead with the offer. I should lead with the offer—get it on the table before he’s even seen it, give him the out before he has to find one himself, keep my dignity approximately intact. I practice the sentence in my head.
I want to show you something, and before you see it, I want you to know I can make you another one.
That’s reasonable. That’s professional. That’s a craftsperson taking responsibility for a decision she made without consulting her client.
His footsteps on the gravel path.
I went a little further than planned; I practice. The wood seemed to want it. No—that’s worse. That implies the wood made me do it. The wood did not make me do it. I made me do it, and the wood complied enthusiastically and we are now both going to live with the consequences.
He ducks through the doorframe.
I open my mouth to say I want to show you something, and what comes out instead is: “Hi.”
He looks at me. Then he looks at the bench. All forward motion stops as he gazes at it.
Not the polite attention of someone encountering a finished product. The other kind. Stillness settles over him, the same as when he studied the phlox photograph. The same focus that caught while he drew the napkin sketch. The unmistakable look of someone who reached somewhere unguarded.
He crosses the workshop in three steps and stops at the bench. For a long moment he just looks at the dulcimer, as though he’s not entirely convinced it’s real.
His hand comes up, then stops before he touches it.
He looks at me.
“May I?”
“It’s yours,” I say.
He picks it up. Both hands, careful, the same way he picked up the inherited dulcimer, only with more reverence.
He turns it in the light from the west window, and the velara shift and the grain moves underneath them, and it looks like what it is: something made for this specific person and no one else.
He doesn’t say anything.
“I owe you for the decoration,” he says finally.
“You don’t.”
“This is—” He looks at me. “Honey. This is weeks of work.”
“You didn’t ask for it. It was my decision.
” I reach for the professional tone I practiced forty-five seconds ago when he was on the gravel path.
“Which is why I want you to know—I can make you another one. Plain, no charge. Three weeks, maybe less now that I have the templates. If this isn’t—” I gesture at the soundboard. “If it’s not what you wanted.”
He glances at me. Then he looks back at the dulcimer. His thumb moves across the burned lines, following the curve of a petal the way his thumb moved across the repaired gouge in the inherited dulcimer, finding the edges of things.
“No,” he says.
“I want you to know the option—”
“No.” He looks up. “This is mine.” He looks back at the dulcimer. His thumb stills on the wood. “I’m not taking another one. And I’m not paying you for a plain instrument I didn’t get.” He looks back at the flowers. “What do I owe you for this?”
“You don’t owe me anything. I made a decision without asking you, and the least I can do is stand behind it without charging you for it.” I pick up my coffee because I need something to do with my hands. “I hope you’re extremely secure in your masculinity.”
Something shifts in his face. “Why?”
I nod at the soundboard.
He looks down at the pale pink velara covering every inch of it and then back at me and then he laughs—the real one, the one that doesn’t perform, the one that just comes out. “It’s pink,” he says.
“It’s very pink.”
“It’s the most pink thing I’ve ever owned.”
“In my defense,” I say, “they were your flowers.”
His smile hasn’t left. He looks at the dulcimer again, at his thumb on the burned lines, and the smile goes from laughing to private, turned inward. “They were,” he says. “They really were.”
He tries twice more to pay me. I decline twice more.
He accepts this the way he accepts low doorframes, without making it anyone else’s problem, which is its own kind of statement.
We talk for twenty minutes about the instrument, the wider neck, how the fret spacing feels under his hand when he reaches for the upper positions.
He plays a few notes, listens, then plays them again.
The sound that comes out of it is warm and low and rich, the dulcimer finding its voice under his fingers for the first time.
I stand in my workshop, listening to it and feel the deep satisfaction of something made right.
When he leaves, he carries it like it’s already been his for years.
I stand in the doorway and watch him settle the dulcimer on the passenger seat.
He glances up, waves. Then he’s gone, and the property is gold and green around me, and the crow has stopped complaining, and the workshop behind me smells of char and varnish and the ghost of the finish I applied three days ago.
Well, I think.
I go inside and make more coffee.