14. Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fourteen
Kragen
The invitation was easy. The waiting was not.
She was in the workshop when I called. I could tell by the quiet behind her voice, and I said I’d like to take her to dinner sometime if she was willing.
There was a pause I’ve spent more time than I’d like thinking about since.
Then she said there’s a place she likes, past her property, and she’d text me the address.
She texted the address twenty minutes later. I took that as a good sign.
While waiting for the dulcimer to be delivered, I watched countless YouTube videos.
Now that I have it, I’ve been playing the dulcimer in the evenings instead of the guitar.
The tuning comes easily—the intervals are familiar enough.
The fretting hand is the problem. Decades of muscle memory reaching for positions this instrument doesn’t have.
Relearning how to be a beginner is not a feeling I’ve had in a long time.
I pull up her drive on a Thursday evening, the Missouri summer is in full effect, the oaks throwing long shadows across the gravel, the air sultry and thick with the smell of cut hay and creek water. This is my fourth time here now. The sound of the place is becoming familiar.
By the time I step out of the car and start toward the porch, the front door is already opening.
She steps outside.
I stop walking.
She looks the same as she always looks: brown hair with a jaw-length wave she doesn’t fight, dark eyes, the kind of stillness that isn’t absence but attention.
And also entirely different. She’s dressed for an evening out, and she’s walking toward me across the porch of her grandmother’s house in the early summer light, and I forget what I was about to say.
She stops at the top of the porch steps. We’re nearly eye level, which is new, and neither of us says anything about it.
Neither of us speaks. She looks at me with the focused attention she gives everything she’s trying to assess, and I look back, and the evening sits around us doing nothing helpful.
“The drive to the restaurant is about twenty minutes,” she says.
“I know.” I looked it up after she texted me the address.
She nods. Her expression suggests she’s aware that was not a useful thing to say and has decided to live with it. I find this enormously reassuring.
“You look nice,” I say, because she does and because I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
Color pinkens her face. “Thank you,” she says, perhaps quieter than she meant to. Then she straightens slightly, as if she’s correcting for something. It’s the most human thing I’ve ever seen her do, and I have to turn away before she notices me noticing.
I offer her my arm, and she takes it. At the spot where the drive dips slightly, she shifts her weight left without thinking about it. It’s familiar. Has been for weeks. She favors the left side there without even realizing it. I say nothing. Of course I don’t.
I match her pace, and we keep walking. At the car, I open the door for her and she gets in.
In the car, she’s composed and careful in the way she gets when she’s keeping herself on a short leash. She asks how long I’ve worked at the bar.
“Eight years,” I tell her.
“That’s a long time.”
“It is.”
She looks out the window.
I don’t ask what she’s thinking.
Her fingers are wrapped around the coffee cup. Not tightly. Just enough that I notice.
Some conversations need the right room.
For a while, neither of us says anything.
The place she’s chosen is deeper into the hills, the kind of road that makes you wonder if you’ve taken a wrong turn and then delivers you somewhere that justifies all of it.
Delia’s sits at a crossroads where two county roads meet, a converted farmhouse with a hand-painted sign and a gravel lot with a dozen pickups parked there.
The screen door looks like the original screen door.
From inside, even from the lot, I can hear music—fiddle and guitar, something with a two-step underneath it, not loud yet but present, the band warming into the evening.
I’m already deciding I like it before we’ve gotten out of the car.
Honey pushes through the screen door ahead of me, and I follow her in. A woman behind the counter—fifties, gray braid, apron with a rooster on it—looks up, and her whole face changes.
“Honey.” She comes around the counter with her arms open. “Lord, it’s been a month.”
“More like six weeks,” Honey says into the hug.
Then she pulls back and turns toward me.
She glances at me before she starts the introductions, quick enough that I might have missed it if I weren’t already paying attention.
“Delia, this is Kragen. Kragen, this is Delia. She’s been feeding my family since before I was born. ”
Delia looks up at me. Then up a little more. Then she sticks out her hand and I shake it. She says, “Well,” in a tone that contains an entire paragraph.
“Good to meet you,” I say.
“I imagine it is,” she says. Honey presses her lips together in a way that is definitely her not laughing. Delia waves us toward a booth by the window. “Your mom’s favorite booth,” she says to Honey, and disappears into the kitchen.
I negotiate the booth—the table is not built for me, which is not surprising; nothing is—and get myself arranged.
Honey slides in across from me and unfolds her menu with the focused attention she gives to all things.
It’s one laminated page. She studies it as if it might have changed since she was last here.
“Do you already know what you want?” I ask.
She looks up. “Yes.”
“So the menu is…”
“Decorative,” she says. “At this point.”
I laugh.
“It’s been the same since 1987,” she says. “That’s a recommendation.”
We order. She gets the chicken-fried steak; I get two of them because that’s the reality of the situation.
Delia doesn’t blink at my order, and the iced tea arrives in glasses sweating in the summer air.
The band has found its footing by now—fiddle leading, guitar underneath, the kind of playing that has been doing this long enough to stop thinking about it.
A few couples have moved to the open floor at the far end of the room.
Nobody is making a production of it. It’s just what you do here when the music starts.
Our conversation finds its footing the same way.
She asks about the Taproom, the music, whether I write my own material.
I tell her sometimes. She asks what kind, and I tell her, and she listens completely, with her whole attention.
Somewhere in there I stop being careful because it’s too much work when someone is actually paying attention.
I say something about the problem of writing songs that aren’t embarrassing, and she tilts her head and says, “What makes a song embarrassing?” I think about it.
“When you can tell the writer was more interested in how it sounded than what it meant,” I say. “When the emotion is performed rather than felt. You can always hear the difference.”
She considers this. “Can the writer hear it?”
“Sometimes not until it’s too late,” I say. “That’s the embarrassing part.”
She is, it turns out, genuinely curious about music in the way craftspeople are curious about other crafts—not performing interest, just wanting to understand how the thing works.
She asks good questions. The kind that require actual answers.
I find myself saying things I don’t usually say, not because she pulled them out of me but because the questions made the answers available.
“You love what you do,” she says at some point, and I realize I’ve been talking for ten minutes straight without noticing.
“Yeah,” I say. “I do.”
She nods as if a suspicion has been confirmed.
Then I ask her about the dulcimer kits she sells, and she explains the range of what she makes.
Somewhere in the explanation she stops being careful, too—I can hear it, the way her voice changes register when she’s talking about the workshop as a real place rather than a professional credential. More present. More hers.
“The fact that someone in—where?” I say.
“Last week? Auckland.”
“Auckland is playing something that came out of your workshop. Must feel amazing.”
“Yes,” she says, and the word is quieter and means something else entirely.
The food arrives. The chicken-fried steak is exactly what it should be, and I tell her so.
“I’m glad my standards are achievable,” she says.
“That’s not a low bar. Gravy is easy to get wrong.”
“Gravy and wood finish have more in common than people think,” she says. “Both punish impatience.”
“Is that your philosophy or your grandmother’s?”
She picks up her fork. “At this point, I can’t always tell.”
I want to ask about her grandmother. I’ve been wanting to since I stood in front of that photograph, but I can tell this isn’t the moment. She said it easily, which means it’s not guarded, which means more will come when it comes. I eat my chicken-fried steak and let it sit.
Delia reappears in the middle of the meal, ostensibly to refill the iced tea, actually to look at us. She pours without hurry and says to me, “You know, we were all real proud of this one.” A nod toward Honey. “Back in the day. You know she almost went to the Olympics.”
I set my fork down, giving Delia my full attention.
Honey looks at Delia with an expression of absolute composure. “Delia.”
“What? It’s true.”
“He’s here for chicken-fried steak.”
“He can have both.” Delia looks at me as if we’re already on the same side.
“Gymnastics. She was something. State champion three years running. They were talking Olympic trials.” She shakes her head the way people do when talking about something that didn’t go the way it should have.
“Well.” She pats Honey’s shoulder once, quick and affectionate, and takes her leave with the tea pitcher.
Neither of us speaks.
“Olympic trials,” I say.
“Potentially.” Honey picks her fork back up. “It didn’t happen.”
“How close?”
She looks at me steadily. “Close enough that not happening was a thing.”