30. Epilogue
Epilogue
Honey
The gate went up in October.
Two posts of good Missouri oak, a crossbar, and iron letters hung from the center that spell out StillWater Place in a font I chose because it looked like it had always been there.
Kragen helped me set the posts. He is, it turns out, extremely useful for post-setting, which is one of approximately forty things I’ve discovered about him in the months since a Tuesday afternoon changed the shape of everything.
The kit sale paid for it. He moved in the week after the hooks went up and found three hundred unfilled orders waiting on the bench and rolled up his sleeves without being asked.
We spent two weeks at the workshop table together; his hands learning the kit sequence faster than I expected because his hands learn everything fast. I watched him work and thought: this is what it looks like.
Not dramatic. Just a male at your workbench who knows where you keep the sandpaper.
We fixed the fence line too, and the soft spot on the workshop floor that I’d been stepping around for years. The rest went into a savings account I’ve named in my head, without saying it out loud, after something Kragen sang about in a final verse I heard through an open door.
From the kitchen window, when the morning light comes through the oaks at the right angle, I can see the gate at the end of the drive. StillWater Place. His clan, my land.
Behind me, in the living room, the piano produces a careful sequence of notes.
He’s been at it for twenty minutes, working the same passage, his big hands finding the keys with the patience he brings to everything he decides to learn.
The stool is holding. I reinforced the spindle mechanism with a bracket I fabricated in the workshop from a piece of flat stock, and it has now survived four months of daily use without complaint, which I consider one of my finer engineering achievements.
The napkin is above the piano. Matted in a piece of my grandmother’s lace, framed large, the five velara blooming in their loose cluster just as he drew them that first Thursday in my workshop, in under two minutes, from a memory of a hillside he hadn’t stood on in eight years.
Beside it, also framed, the handwritten lyrics to a song called “Generations,” in his hand, on the paper he used the night it finished itself in his apartment.
He comes into the kitchen in the endearing way he comes into rooms—ducking the doorframe without looking, filling the space, completely at home in a house that was not built for him and has never once made him feel it.
“How does it sound?” he asks.
“Better than last week.”
“That’s not a high bar.”
“It’s an accurate one.”
He comes to stand behind me at the counter, holds me around the waist, and looks out the window at the gate.
“StillWater Place,” he says.
“StillWater Place,” I say.
Neither of us says anything else. Outside, the Missouri November is doing what it does: the oaks stripped of their leaves now, the light coming through differently, the creek still running down the hill the way it always runs.
The turkeys came through the yard on Tuesday.
He watched them from the kitchen window with a wariness I find disproportionate and endearing in equal measure.
His arms loosen as he straightens, and I turn around.
“We have a show tonight,” I say.
“We do.”
I look at the gate through the window one more time. “I shouldn’t be nervous.”
“No,” he agrees.
“I’m a little nervous.”
He looks at me with an indulgent expression. “You’ve been playing that dulcimer since you were seventeen. The room isn’t going to know what hit it.”
“The room knows you,” I say. “It doesn’t know me.”
“It will,” he says. Simple. Like a fact that has already happened and is just waiting on the calendar.
I pick up my coat from the chair.
The Taproom smells like another world.
Rhazgar arrived two hours before anyone else and took over the back corner with a cast-iron pot the size of a small planet and several covered dishes that have been filling the room with smells no one here has a name for.
Now he’s standing beside his setup with his arms crossed and his face arranged into the careful neutrality of someone who has decided not to want things visibly.
He is the most observant person I have ever met who is also the least interested in being observed.
“He always this quiet?” Walt asks me, appearing at my elbow.
“From what I understand,” I say.
Walt looks at Rhazgar for a moment with the expression he gets when he’s reading something.
Then he nods once and goes back to his coffee.
Walt is at a table near the stage tonight, not behind the bar.
He’s been at a table near the stage every Friday for two months now, since the papers were signed and the bar became Kragen’s in every sense it hadn’t already been.
The order is the same every time. He tips well.
He doesn’t offer opinions unless asked, and when asked he gives one sentence that lands like a dropped stone.
For perhaps the first time since I’ve known him, he seems genuinely happy.
The room fills the way it usually does on Fridays—the regulars first, then the people who’d heard there was something worth hearing at the Taproom on Fridays.
Ed and Pete are at their usual spots. Grulk has claimed a chair in the front and is currently explaining to the people on either side of him how he personally engineered this entire situation, which is not accurate and also not entirely wrong.
He catches my eye across the room and pauses just long enough to look at me—warm, satisfied, completely himself.
I raise my glass slightly. He beams and goes back to taking credit for everything.
Kragen finds me backstage—which is to say, in the hallway by the storage room, because this is a bar in Missouri and there is no actual backstage. Then Grulk appears at the end of it.
“Kragen.” He points with great ceremony. “You are more StillWater than you ever wanted to admit. I have always known this.”
Kragen is quiet for a moment. “A year ago, I would have argued with you about that.”
“Yes,” Grulk says. “And you would have been wrong.”
“And I would have been wrong.”
Grulk beams with the proud satisfaction of a male receiving credit he feels is long overdue. “I take full responsibility,” he announces, to both of us and possibly the storage room. “For all of it. You’re welcome.” He disappears back toward the bar at a volume that parts the crowd.
Kragen looks at me.
“He’s not wrong,” I say.
“No,” he says. “He’s not.”
The small stage at the Taproom holds two stools, two instruments, and approximately zero room for anything else, which is exactly right.
My grandmother’s dulcimer on the left. His velara dulcimer on the right.
The wood-burned flowers pale under the stage lamp, the same pale pink I mixed from his description in my workshop before I knew what any of this was going to become.
We open with something of his, a melody from his world, old in the way that folk music is old, the kind of song that carries the weight of everyone who’s sung it before.
The room goes quiet when he plays it, his voice and the dulcimer together, the way they’ve always been.
I now understand, and somehow I’m only hearing it for the first time.
Not more attentive. Held. Like the sound is asking something of them.
I watch the back of the room. Vraag and Riona are there. Riona’s hand is on his arm. She’s watching his face the way someone watches a face they’ve learned to read.
I watch Kragen watching what the music does to them.
What moves across his face says everything.
Not a new thing: the completion of something that has been building since before I knew him, since a male who had been performing belonging for years sat in a bar with a guitar and didn’t yet know the performance was almost over.
He is not performing now. He is just playing.
His world’s music in his hands, his people in the room, a woman beside him with her grandmother’s dulcimer, and none of it requiring anything except that he be exactly who he is.
I come in on the third bar with the dulcimer, the way we’ve practiced, the Appalachian melody finding the spaces he leaves open for it. Two traditions in conversation. Neither subordinate. The room stays still in the way it stays still when something real is happening.
We play three songs from his world and four from mine, and then Generations, which is not from either world but belongs to both of us and to our property and to a woman who cleaned up a broken plate without making it about the plate.
When the last note fades, the room holds it for a moment before it applauds, which is how you know it was real.
A woman at the table nearest the stage—I don’t know her, she came with someone who knows Ed—leans forward while Kragen is adjusting his tuning.
“What are you called?” she asks. “Do you two have a name?”
I don’t have to think about it.
“The StillWater Duo,” I say.
He looks at me.
I look at him.
He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to. What moves across his face says everything, all the way through, the way he always does everything—completely, without apology, present in all of it.
After we play the second set, after the bar closes, Kragen’s hand finds mine on the edge of the stage. His thumb moves across my knuckles, slow and present, the way it does when he’s not thinking about it, which is always.
I think about the last verse of a song I heard through an open door on a Tuesday afternoon in July.
A child’s hands on the dulcimer strings.
I think about it the way I’ve been thinking about it for months—not with the old fear, not with the old careful distance I kept between myself and anything that required believing the future would be different from the past. Just with the feeling of a door that is no longer closed.
I turn my face into his shoulder, breathe in the reassuring scent of him, cedar and flannel, and feel an optimism I haven’t let myself feel in a decade. He doesn’t say anything. Neither do I.
The Taproom settles into its after-close quiet.
His bar now. A room that has held eight years of his life and is holding something different now: not the performance of belonging but the thing itself, arrived at last in a Missouri bar with a velara dulcimer and a woman who burned his flowers into wood because her hands took her there.
Outside, twenty-three miles east, the creek is running.
StillWater Place is waiting.
We know the way.