21. Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-One
Kragen
The Taproom on a Tuesday afternoon has a different quality than at any other time.
No crowd expected, no prep urgency, just the expectant air of a room that knows what it’s for and is resting between purposes.
The chairs are still on the tables from last night.
The light coming through the front windows hits the stage at an angle it doesn’t hit at any other hour, and the stage looks back at it like it’s waiting for something. Which it always is.
I’ve been here since two. My shift starts at three.
The song is almost done. Has been almost done for three days, which is a specific kind of torment—like a word that won’t come but you can feel the shape of it.
I know what it needs. I can hear the absence.
Every time I play it through, I get to the same place and feel the gap where the ending should be and can’t find it, and then I set the guitar down and walk around the bar and come back and try again.
I play it through now. The opening bars—the ones that came from the morning in her driveway, the creek and the wind in the oaks—and then the middle section that built itself in pieces over weeks.
One section came after she told me about her grandmother at the creek.
Another arrived the night I sat in a StillWater clearing and watched her receive a drum she’d never heard before like she’d been listening for it her whole life.
When I reach the end, the gap is still there.
For a while, I sit with it. Then I hear the side door. I don’t turn around. The footsteps are familiar—the weight and rhythm of someone who moves through the world as if he owns it and sees no reason to revise that assessment.
“The door was unlocked,” Grulk says.
“The door is always unlocked when I’m here.”
He comes in and settles onto a stool at the bar, which requires negotiation because Grulk doesn’t really fit on bar stools, but he refuses to acknowledge this. I hear him get situated. Then silence. Which, from Grulk, means he’s actually listening, which almost never happens.
I play the song through again. All the way to the gap.
I stop. Set the guitar on my thighs.
“What is that?” he says.
Not a question exactly. More like a statement that needs verifying.
“Something I’ve been working on.”
“I’ve heard you work on things. This is different.” He’s quiet, then, “Play it again.”
I do.
When I stop this time, the bar is very still. The afternoon light has moved two degrees while I was playing. There’s a glass on the rack behind the bar that catches it and throws a small bright shape on the wall that I’ve been watching between passes.
“That’s not a bar song,” Grulk says.
“No.”
“It’s not the old song either. The one from home.”
“No.”
He gets up, goes behind the bar, pours two Grim Darks, and returns to his seat. “Then what is it?” He sets both glasses down.
I think about deflecting. I’m good at deflecting—years of practice, a room full of people who love a version of me I’ve been carefully maintaining.
The deflection is right there, available, and I don’t use it.
I don’t know why. Maybe because Grulk is looking at me with the expression he gets when he’s decided to be patient, which is the most dangerous thing about him.
Maybe because I’ve been carrying this for weeks and the weight of it has gotten to the point where the carrying is more effort than the saying.
“It’s for her,” I say.
Grulk doesn’t move. Doesn’t perform a reaction. He absorbs it with the kind of attention he gives when he’s genuinely listening, which looks almost nothing like the rest of Grulk.
He’s quiet for long enough that I play the opening bars again, not for him, just because my hands need somewhere to go. Then I stop.
“Tell me what it is,” Grulk says. “The song. What is it for?”
I set the guitar across my knees.
“You know what she made me,” I say. “The dulcimer.”
“Yes. Wider neck.”
“She covered the entire soundboard with velara flowers.” I run my thumb along the low E string without sounding it, the way you touch something you’re trying to think clearly about.
“On my first visit, I mentioned it because she had a photograph that reminded me of the hillsides back home. I drew a few velara on a napkin. She took that description and burned the design into the wood and painted it the color I said they were—darker toward the center, lighter at the edges—and she covered the entire soundboard and didn’t charge me for it.
When I tried to pay her, she said, ‘No. You didn’t ask for it,’ like that settled the question. ”
Grulk has gone very still. Not generally a HammerFall trait.
“She didn’t know,” I say. “She wasn’t doing it for any reason except that her hands took her there. She just followed her craft instincts and made me something that couldn’t have been made for anyone else.”
“Kragen.” His voice is quiet.
“I know.”
“That’s the perfect gift.” His voice carries wonder; his eyes are rounder than usual.
“I know.”
He sits with it for a moment. When Grulk sits with something you can feel it—the volume of him going internal, the usual forward momentum pausing while the information settles. “And the song.”
“Is the answer. Or it’s supposed to be.” I pick up the guitar again, not to play, just to have something in my hands.
“It came from listening to her. Everything I know about her—her grandmother, a life-changing injury, the workshop, the way she looks at the property on a Sunday morning. It’s all in there. It could only have been made for her.”
“Then give it to her.”
“And say what? Here’s the song I wrote because I owe you one?
” I shake my head. “The moment she knows the framework, she’ll filter everything through it.
Every visit, every coffee, the drum gathering, everything I said to her in her grandmother’s house.
It will all look different through that frame. ”
Grulk studies me for a long moment. He’s thinking. I can tell because he’s not talking.
“In my clan,” he says finally, “if a female gave a male the perfect gift and he spent months learning her well enough to meet it, that would be a beautiful thing. A male taking a female seriously enough to listen all the way down.” He spreads his hands.
“Tell her. Tell her what it means. Tell her the song is the answer. Women want to know when they’ve moved someone to extraordinary lengths. ”
“She’s not afraid of the obligation,” I say. “She doesn’t know about it. She thinks I kept visiting because I wanted to.”
“And did you?”
The question lands without warning, aimed perfectly.
“Yes,” I say. “But I can’t separate it anymore. The wanting came first. The obligation arrived after. Now they’re so tangled I can’t show her one without the other being in the frame.”
Grulk nods slowly. “Tell her anyway,” he says. “Trust that she will understand what it means.”
I set the guitar on the stage and walk to the bar. We sit with it for a moment, the two of us. The room sounding silent with the absence of music. Then Grulk finishes his Grim Dark and sets the glass in the sink.
“She’s StillWater,” he says at the door. “She understands what it means to take something seriously.”
He lets himself out.
The bar is quiet again.
I pour myself a Grim Dark and sit with it going warm in my hand. The afternoon light has moved again. The bright shape on the wall has stretched and thinned and is nearly gone.
Grulk is not wrong. I keep returning to that.
He is not wrong about the obligation, not wrong about what the song means, not wrong that she’s someone who takes things seriously.
His logic is sound. His love for the situation is genuine.
He wants this to go well in the way that Grulk wants things: completely, visibly, without reservation.
The thing he doesn’t know is her history. I’m not sure I could give it to him even if I tried, because the history is hers and she gave it to me at a creek on a Sunday morning when she trusted me with the worst of it, and that trust isn’t mine to redistribute.
I go back to the stage.
I pick up the guitar.
I play the song.
I’m home by midnight. I don’t intend to play again, but the guitar is next to me on the couch, out of its case, available, and I pick it up without deciding to and start from the beginning.
First come the opening bars. The creek and the oaks.
Then the middle section—her grandmother’s hands cleaning up what she threw, the dulcimer coming down from the wall at exactly the right moment.
There’s the hill on her property where the oaks throw their shadows east. The turkeys.
The way she sat with the StillWater drum as if she’d been listening for it her whole life.
When I get to the gap, I keep playing.
I don’t know why this time is different. I’m not trying harder. I haven’t changed my approach or discovered some new technique. I’m playing the song the way I’ve been playing it for weeks, following it where it goes, and this time when I reach the place where it usually stops, it doesn’t stop.
Then the ending arrives.
Not built toward. Not worked for. Just there, the way the melody arrived that morning in her driveway—fully formed, inevitable, the only thing that could possibly come next. Four bars. Exactly what comes next.
I play it through to the end.
I sit in the quiet of my apartment and let it settle.
The song is finished.
I play it once more, slowly, to make sure it’s still there. It is. Every note, the whole shape of it, from the first bar to the last. It’s done. It’s right. It’s the best thing I’ve ever written.
It couldn’t have been made for anyone else. It came from listening to her, and it’s made of her, not the version of her she shows to people but the version she showed me on a Sunday morning at a creek when she trusted me with the parts she doesn’t show.
I set the guitar down.
The apartment is very quiet. The guitar and the one photograph and the furniture I bought because it was the right size. Eight years and it still looks like someone moved in recently and hasn’t gotten around to the rest of it.
The obligation is present. It’s always present.
But sitting here with the finished song, I notice something different about its weight.
Or not different, lighter. Not because it’s resolved.
It isn’t resolved. I still don’t know how to give the song without the framing poisoning it.
I still don’t know how she’ll hear it if she ever hears it.
But the song exists now.
That’s the thing I’ve been circling for months and couldn’t see until this moment: the song finished itself tonight in an empty apartment with no audience and no recipient and no reason except that it was true and it needed to exist. I wasn’t building the gift.
I wasn’t answering the obligation. I was following something that had somewhere to go, the way I always follow things that have somewhere to go, because that’s what I do. It’s what I’ve always done.
The obligation didn’t make me listen to her. I listened to her because she was worth listening to, from the first visit, from the moment she handed me back the exit I wasn’t looking for and I said, “No, this is mine,” before I’d finished thinking about why.
That much I know now.
I sit with it carefully, with both hands, not trusting it too fast. But it’s there. Clean and clear and not going anywhere.
The question that’s been circling for months arrives one more time, the same loop it always runs: if there were no obligation, would I still be here?
The answer comes before I finish asking.
Yes.
This time, for the first time, I trust it.
Twenty-three miles away, Honey is in her grandmother’s house, or her workshop, or somewhere on her property, and she doesn’t know any of this.
She doesn’t know about the obligation. She doesn’t know there’s a song.
She doesn’t know that somewhere in the last few months, listening to her became the most important thing I do.
She’ll know when I give her the song.
I just have to figure out how.
Across town, I’m almost certain, Grulk is telling someone he’s solved the problem.