12. Chapter Twelve
Chapter Twelve
Honey
His car goes around the curve in the drive and then disappears.
I stand in the workshop doorway for a moment after the sound of the engine fades.
The property is bright in the sunlight, the oaks throwing their shadows west. Somewhere down the hill, the creek produces its tranquil background noise.
Everything looks the same as it did when I walked out to the workshop.
I go back inside.
The bench where his dulcimer sat for weeks is empty. Not just empty in the way a workbench sits empty between projects. Empty the way a room feels after a presence has left it. The light falls across the bare wood, and there’s nothing for it to catch. I keep reaching for what isn’t there.
I put the woodburning kit away.
This takes a while because I do it properly—the pens arranged in the roll case by tip size, the temperature unit wrapped and shelved. No current orders that need it.
On the workbench, there are walnut shavings in the corner and fine sawdust along the back edge from the final sanding. I sweep them into my hand and throw them away. This takes less time than the woodburning kit.
I clean the tools next. Not because that needs doing either.
I do it because my hands need something to do while my brain runs a loop I don’t want to be running.
The loop goes approximately: it’s done, I made something, he took it, that’s how commissions work, I’ve done this dozens of times, the bench is empty because I finished a project and gave it to the client, which is the entire point.
The loop is not wrong. It is also not the whole picture.
The whole picture is that I burned those flowers freehand in the lamplight for hours and days.
The whole picture is that the project started as a standard commission and turned into something else without my permission.
The whole picture was that I’d spent weeks in this workshop with his dulcimer, and over those weeks the room had begun to feel differently occupied.
Not better or worse, just changed in the quiet way rooms change when you’ve been living alongside someone else’s project.
The whole picture is that this morning I offered him an out I did not want him to take and he didn’t take it and now the bench is empty and I’m cleaning tools that don’t need cleaning in a workshop gone still around me.
I know what this is. I’ve been here before. Not the same, different shape, different materials, but I know the feeling of not being ready for something to be over.
I put the tools away, sweep, organize my order binder, and do some updates on my website until I can call my workday done without guilt.
Inside, I make dinner. Not a real dinner, eggs and toast, which is what I make when I’m not actually thinking about food. I eat standing at the counter because sitting down feels like admitting the evening is going to be long.
No. It’s not going to be long. It’s going to be a normal evening. I’m going to eat my eggs and wash my plate and do whatever people do on evenings when they’ve finished a significant commission, and the client has driven away with it and the work is done.
I wash my plate.
I dry it.
The kitchen holds nothing but the sound of crickets.
This has been my house my entire life, generations of women lived in it before me, and I know it in every season and every light condition.
This is early summer evening quiet, the windows open to the last of the warmth, the creek just audible if I stop moving.
I know this house. I know something in it feels different tonight.
I go into the living room.
Grandmother’s dulcimer is on the wall where it’s been my whole life.
It’s been even more important since she brought it down and offered it to me and waited while I decided whether I was going to let my injury be the end of everything or just the end of one thing.
Walnut, aged dark. The wood has a warmth to it in lamplight that it doesn’t have in full sun.
I’ve played it so many times my hands settle onto it as if they’re returning somewhere.
I take it down.
Not to perform. Not to practice. Just—I need the quiet filled, and this is what I do when I don’t want to sit in silence.
This is what she did. Every Sunday morning and most Sunday evenings and sometimes on Thursday nights when the week had been heavy.
She played because it was what you did when the house was too still, and I play because she taught me, and that’s the whole explanation.
I bring the stool in from the kitchen because the living room chairs aren’t the right height and I sit down and I play “Shady Grove” because it’s the first thing she ever taught me and it comes out of my hands before I think about it.
Then I play the tune that comes after “Shady Grove” which is “The Water Is Wide” and after that I play the one with no name that my grandmother made up and never wrote down and that I learned by hearing it so many times it went from her hands into mine through the air.
I play until I stop thinking about what I’m playing.
This is the whole point.
Outside the workshop windows, the dark comes up the hill slowly, the way it does in summer, the sky pale in the west while the yard goes to shadow.
I observe it without really seeing it, my hands moving through a song I learned before I understood music, and the house settles around me the way old houses settle in the evening: a sound from the floor, the creak of the back door in the heat.
Four generations of this house settling into summer evenings. I know all of it.
My phone buzzes on the table.
I don’t stop playing.
I play through to the end of the song, and then I pick it up.
Kragen: I pulled over twice on the way home. Just to look at it.
I read it again. Then a third time. I sit with it and then I set the phone down and pick up the dulcimer and play four bars of nothing in particular while I decide what I want to say.
I type a sentence. Delete it.
I type: Glad it’s home. And send it before I change my mind.
I put the phone face-down on the table.
Pick up the dulcimer.
I play until the west goes fully dark, and the lamplight is the only light in the room, and through the window the workshop is a dark shape against the darker oaks.
I play the named songs and the unnamed ones and the one my grandmother made up, and when I run out of those I play random chords, something my hands arrive at on their own in the way that happens when you’ve been playing long enough that the music stops being a decision.
The creek is still running down the hill.
The phone stays face-down on the table.
I play.