11. Chapter Eleven
Chapter Eleven
Kragen
The dulcimer is on the passenger seat because I can’t put it in the back.
That’s what I tell myself. The back seat has my jacket on it, and I’d have to move things around, and the instrument is better off where I can see it. That’s why it’s on the passenger seat instead of the back. That’s the reason.
I’m still in her driveway. Haven’t started the car.
I look up and see her standing in the doorway.
Starting the car, I pull around the curve in her driveway and stop.
I look at the velara covering the soundboard—pale pink in the Monday morning light coming through the windshield, the burned lines giving each petal depth, the whole thing looking like it grew there because that’s what pyrography does.
She explained it to me once: the design becomes part of the instrument rather than something applied to the surface.
My flowers are burned into the wood. Painted the color I described.
She covered the entire soundboard and didn’t charge me for it, and when I tried to pay her, she said, “You didn’t ask for this,” like that settled the question.
It does not settle the question.
I look at the dulcimer.
She was nervous when I walked in. She hid it well—her professional composure was in place, the coffee in her hand, the offer ready before I’d even seen it.
“I can make you another one.” She said it before I could form a reaction, gave me the exit before I needed one, stood there with her chin up waiting for me to reject this dulcimer.
I couldn’t say no fast enough.
I said it before I fully knew what I was saying. “No, this is mine.” The instrument was only part of what I meant. I still don’t entirely know what else I was claiming.
Or’nok. The word arrives the way it always lived in me, without being called, already there. The perfect gift. The one that could only come from someone who was truly, completely paying attention.
I said thank you three times. Tried to pay her, and she refused. Then carried the instrument to my car like it had always been mine.
Grulk’s voice: Saying thank you and walking away is not receiving a gift.
What I owe her has a shape. I don’t know what it is yet. I know it has to come from having paid the same attention she paid me—which means I need to know her well enough for that to be possible, and I don’t, not yet, not the way this requires.
I have a reason to keep showing up.
The thought arrives with a clarity that feels like relief, and then immediately complicates itself.
Is that the real reason? Was it ever just the dulcimer?
The attraction came first; I had no idea who she was until I walked through her door.
But the obligation arrived fast enough that I can’t fully separate them now.
My window is rolled down, and there’s a creek flowing somewhere down the hill and the breeze is moving through the oaks above the property and somewhere up the hill a bird is arguing with himself in the branches of a tree I don’t know the name of.
It’s a warm morning. Missouri in early summer, the green of it, the smell of this specific place that I’ve been to precisely three times and somehow know.
The melody arrives.
Not built toward, not worked for—just there, fully formed, rising out of the sound of the creek and the wind in the oaks and the bird doing its complicated thing overhead.
Four bars. I hear them complete, start to finish, the intervals that make them feel like something older than I am, something that was waiting to exist in exactly this key.
I don’t move.
The melody holds when I run through it again in my head—every note, the rhythm of it, the quality that makes it feel tied to this property, to the creek and the oaks and the summer morning and the woman inside who makes coffee on pickup days and goes further than planned and apologizes for it.
As I pull out of her drive, the dulcimer rides beside me while the melody loops continuously through my mind.
By the time I turn onto the highway, I understand that I am going to be spending a great deal of time on this property, for reasons I don’t entirely trust yet, looking for something I don’t have a name for.
I play the melody back in my head twice on the drive home to make sure I haven’t lost it.
I haven’t.