9. Chapter Nine
Chapter Nine
Kragen
By eleven, I’m working my way down the bar in the same order I always do: glasses first, then the taps, then the floor.Thursday close is quieter than on a weekend. Half the crowd, half the noise, Walt leaving earlier because he knows I’ve got it.
The bell over the door jingles right at eleven-fifteen.
Grulk.
Which means he’s been waiting for the last customer to leave. Which means he’s been thinking about the dulcimer again.
I shouldn’t have told Grulk about the dulcimer.
I mentioned it three weeks ago in a moment of weak judgment when he asked why I’d driven out to the county on a Tuesday afternoon, and I gave him the short version: a custom instrument being built with a wider neck, but no names, no details, nothing he could work with. Evidently, that wasn’t enough.
He drops onto his stool, and I pour him a Grim Dark without being asked.
“Don’t,” I say.
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You’re about to.”
He picks up the glass with great dignity. “I was simply going to ask how you are.”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
“I look like I always look.”
Grulk tilts his head and studies me the way mechanics study an engine making a sound they don’t trust. I wipe down the section of the bar nearest him and wait.
“You look,” he says finally, “like a male who is thinking about something he’s not thinking about.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“It makes perfect sense. What is it?”
“Nothing.” I move to check the taps. When I come back, he hasn’t moved. “It’s nothing, Grulk.”
“Is it the dulcimer?”
I definitely shouldn’t have opened my mouth about that.
“It’s a commission,” I say. “I needed a wider neck. It’s being built.”
“By who?”
“A luthier.”
Something happens in his eyes that I don’t like. “A luthier,” he repeats, in the tone of a male filing a location for later use. “And is this luthier—”
“A craftsperson. Who is building me an instrument. That’s the complete story.”
He drinks his beer and looks away when he sets it down. That’s how he does it, backs off just enough to come at things from a different direction.
“The dulcimer is a beautiful instrument,” he says. “It has a particular sound. Very—” he searches for the word. “Still. It doesn’t perform. It just is what it is.”
“I know what a dulcimer sounds like.”
“I’m saying it suits you. Not the bar version of you.” He lifts his glass to encompass the room, the empty stage, the chairs on the tables. “The other version.”
I look at him.
“Go home, Grulk.”
“Of course.” He finishes the last of his Grim Dark and sets the glass in the rack himself, which he only does when he knows he’s pushed as far as he’s getting. “Tell the luthier I said hello.”
“I’m not telling anyone anything.”
He smiles and lets himself out. I lock the door behind him and stand in the empty bar.
Walt built this room, and I’ve been building it alongside him for eight years. It shows in the way the place holds itself after close, not empty, just resting. I do a final walk-through out of habit: pull the taps, check the back door, turn off the light over the stage.
I pick up the guitar case from behind the bar where it spent the evening and shrug it onto my back.
The walk home is seven minutes. I take ten.
Monday is in four days.