26. Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Six
Kragen
Ed asked to hear the whole thing, which is how I ended up behind my own bar on a Tuesday afternoon playing a song I finished in my apartment at midnight about a woman who hasn’t answered my texts in a month.
It isn’t a bar song. I know that. It’s too quiet, too interior, the wrong register for a room that’s built for Friday nights and Grulk at full volume.
But Ed asked, and Pete backed him up, and Walt had already gone to the office, so I pulled the dulcimer out of my back seat and started from the beginning.
It turns out that playing something true in a quiet room to two men who aren’t going to analyze it is easier than I expected. They just listened. That was enough.
I’m in the final verse when she walks in.
I look up because the light changes—the door behind her, the afternoon coming through—and she’s standing just inside it with her hands at her sides and her face softer than I’ve ever seen it except when we shared her bed.
The words almost go.
I feel them start to dissolve—the melody holds, my hands hold, but the words simply leave me, because she is here, she is standing in my bar on a Tuesday with the July light behind her and I have spent a month building increasingly convinced arguments that she was not coming back, and every one of them evaporates in the second it takes to register that it’s her.
I don’t stop playing.
I don’t know why, except that I’m mid-sentence and the sentence is true and stopping would be a different kind of statement than finishing.
So I hold her gaze—she lets me, she doesn’t look away—and I sing the last two lines of a song I wrote about her grandmother and her mother and the lace in her windows and what I want for the rest of my life, directly to her face, in my bar, in front of Ed and Pete who have the grace not to turn around.
I can’t help dreaming what I’ve got no right to wish
But Goddess, I hope she’ll let me help build a thing that looks like this.
The last note fades.
The room is very quiet.
She hasn’t moved. I haven’t moved. My hands are still on the dulcimer. Ed picks up his glass and takes a slow, deliberate sip, and sets it back down. Pete, to his eternal credit, says to his beer: “Don’t worry about us. If we need more, we’ll grab what we need and put the money on the bar.”
I set the dulcimer down.
She crosses the room.
Not running. The way she moves when she’s decided something—the compact, deliberate walk I know from her workshop, from the path down to her creek, from every time she’s made up her mind and is getting on with it.
She comes around the end of the bar and I come around to meet her and her hand finds my arm before either of us speaks, and I read her face the way I read everything she gives me—carefully, all the way through—and what I find there is open in a way I have not seen it before.
Not managed. Not held at the careful distance she usually holds things.
Just her.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi,” I say.
We stand here. There is a great deal that could be said and neither of us says it.
“There’s a creek,” I say finally. “Behind the building. Small one. I don’t think you’ve seen it.”
Something moves across her face—not quite a smile, the thing that lives just before one. “Show me,” she says.
We go out the back.
The creek behind the Taproom is nothing like hers.
It’s narrower, shallower, running between the back of the building and the treeline, the kind of creek that exists because water has to go somewhere and this is where it went.
There’s a fallen sycamore along the bank, the bark gone smooth from weather and years.
We sit. Heat, insects, light drifting through sycamore leaves. Her shoulder is against my arm.
Neither of us says anything for a moment.
“I heard it from the parking lot,” she says.
“I figured.”
“How long have you—”
“Months,” I say. “Since the dulcimer. Since before I knew what it was.”
She nods, looking at the water. “My mother,” she says. “You got that from one sentence at Delia’s.”
“And whatever Delia said about the booth.”
She pauses, thinking. “She worked doubles so I could train. I don’t think I ever said that to anyone in exactly those words before.”
“Mm,” I say.
The creek moves over whatever is under it. A woodpecker works at something in the treeline with patient, rhythmic focus.
“I kept seeing you,” I say. “After you left. The workshop, the lamp on late. The creek on a Sunday morning.” I look at my hands on my knees.
“I could see myself there. Every time I tried to stop, I was just, still there. In your kitchen. In that workshop. At the bench next to you.” I look at her.
“I know I don’t fit the chairs in your house.
My feet hang off the end of your bed by a significant margin.
I’ve been aware of this.” A pause. “But I could see myself spending the rest of my life not fitting into those chairs.”
She looks at the water for a moment. Then, “I’d like that,” she says.
A pause. I don’t breathe.
“Except for one thing.”
My breath pauses until she adds, “I think we could get a bigger bed.”
It comes out of me before I’ve decided—the real laugh, low and a little undone, the one that changes my face—and she is watching it land with that expression she gets when she’s said something dry and means every word of it.
I’ve been looking at her eyes for months. Right now, they are entirely new.
I put my hand over hers on the sycamore bark.
She turns her palm up and holds it.
We sit for a while. The creek runs. The sycamore leaves move in whatever passes for a breeze in Missouri July. Behind us the Taproom holds its afternoon quiet, and Ed and Pete are at the bar, and Walt is in the office, and none of it requires anything from either of us right now.
After a while, she says, “We should go.”
“Yeah,” I say.
Neither of us moves for another minute.
Then we do.
I stop at the office door on the way through. Walt looks up. “I’m going to be out for the rest of the afternoon,” I say. He glances up at me. Then, at the parking lot through the window. Then back at me. “Okay,” he says. And goes back to whatever he was doing.
Honey’s ahead of me in the parking lot, walking with the ease of someone who has put something down and doesn’t intend to pick it back up.
I don’t say anything because there’s nothing to say that the last hour hasn’t already said.
I think about a hillside covered in velara that I haven’t stood on in eight years and how the strangest things follow you through the crossings between worlds.
She opens her car door and looks back at me.
“Twenty-three miles,” she says.
“I know the way,” I say.
She gets in. I go to my car. We pull out of the lot, her ahead, me behind, the two-lane opening up in front of us into the Missouri hills.
The creek will be running when we get there.
The house will be lit from inside.