16. Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Sixteen
Kragen
The apartment is dark and I’m awake and it’s not even five.
This is not unusual. I sleep four hours most nights.
StillWater metabolism, something about how the body processes rest differently when the nervous system runs at a specific frequency.
I’ve read about it. It doesn’t help. What’s unusual is waking up and lying here in the early-morning dark of my apartment and not going through the bar inventory or the set list or the logistics of the afternoon, which is what I normally do when sleep cuts out early.
What I do instead is lie here and think about the sound of her grandmother’s dulcimer in a lamplit room, and the stillness that came over me when she started playing, and the way she set the instrument down on both contact points, careful, the way you set down something that has weight beyond its physical weight.
And then the other part. The part I was not prepared for.
She kissed me like she meant it. That’s the cleanest way to say it.
No performance, no uncertainty, no working out what she wanted while she was doing it.
She decided, and the kiss was the proof of that decision, and I have been in this bed for four hours with that knowledge, and it has not gotten quieter.
The question is quieter, though.
That’s the thing I keep arriving at and not trusting: if there were no obligation, would I still be here?
Last night the answer came so fast I didn’t finish the sentence.
She had her arms around my neck in the lamplight, and the question tried to surface and couldn’t.
Not because it was answered. Not because it disappeared.
There was just no room for it in that moment, which feels like information even if it isn’t certainty.
I don’t know what to do with that, but it feels dangerously close to relief.
I get up at six. Make coffee. Stand at the window with it and look at Sunshine Valley going about its early morning: the light coming up over the ridge, the Taproom down the street already taking a delivery, the woman who walks her three enormous dogs at this hour every single day without exception.
Normal things. I’m standing in my apartment, surrounded by normal things, and I am not the same person who left it yesterday evening. I find I don’t mind that at all.
The dulcimer is on its stand in the corner.
I’ve been playing it in the evenings. The fretting hand is coming around. But I still reach for the guitar when I leave the apartment; the guitar goes with me, the dulcimer stays. Those are two different relationships with an instrument, and I haven’t worked out what the second one means.
I drink my coffee and examine it from across the room.
The haunting melody has been with me since the morning in her driveway after I picked it up.
I’ve been carrying it for weeks, turning it over in the back of my head while I’m behind the bar, while I’m driving, in the early hours when sleep cuts out early.
What I’ve been playing it on, in my head, is the guitar.
The intervals work there. The melody is mine in the key of guitar because that’s the instrument I’ve been playing for eight years in a room full of people who know my name.
I put down my coffee. Cross the room. Pick up the dulcimer.
It’s lighter than the guitar. The neck is wider than a standard dulcimer, built for my hands, and it shows. I tune it the way she showed me, checking the intervals, and then I sit on the couch with it and play the melody.
It comes out different.
Not wrong. Different in the way a room sounds different when you hear it from a corner you’ve never stood in: same room, different acoustics, the same thing and also not.
The dulcimer has a particular resonance, warm and old-world in a way that is its own tradition and not mine.
The melody in that resonance doesn’t sound like a song I wrote.
It sounds like a song that already existed somewhere, and I was just the person who found it.
I play it through twice. Sit with the third run for a moment and then let it finish.
I know it came from her, from the creek and the workshop and the way she hands you things without making a ceremony of it. What I don’t know is what it means, what it’s actually about, underneath the melody, in the place where a song either has something to say or it doesn’t.
What matters is that she doesn’t know. And at some point she’s going to need to.
I play the melody one more time and put the dulcimer back on its stand.
The apartment is too small for what I’m feeling. I grab my keys.
The compound is twenty minutes outside of town, built on enough acres that orcs can wander without prying eyes.
The communal hall is empty at this hour.
Most of the compound is asleep or just moving toward breakfast. What isn’t quiet is the kitchen, because Rhazgar is in it, and he operates on a schedule that has nothing to do with the sun or social convention and everything to do with when the broth needs to come off the heat.
He’s WarmHearth clan. Quiet, but not the way I’m quiet. His is the quiet of someone who has decided what matters and isn’t interested in anything else. I’ve known him for four years, yet I’m not sure I know him at all. He doesn’t seem to mind.
He doesn’t look up when I come in.
“There’s bread,” he says. “Sit.”
I sit. The bread is on a board in the center of the table, warm from the oven; the kind of dense dark loaf he makes from a recipe he’s never written down. There’s butter beside it. I cut a piece and eat it standing up, and then sit down properly because the bread earns that much respect.
Rhazgar moves around the kitchen the way he always moves: economical, deliberate, nothing wasted. He’s got a pot simmering that smells like it’s been going since before I woke up. He checks it, adjusts the heat, doesn’t speak.
After a while he says, without turning around, “You drove twenty minutes for bread.”
“The bread is good.”
He makes a sound that is not agreement and not disagreement.
He ladles something into a bowl and sets it in front of me: grain porridge, thick, with what I think are dried berries from the bushes along the compound’s east fence.
I eat it. It’s the kind of food that makes you aware you were hungry before you knew you were hungry.
“There’s a woman,” I say. I don’t mean to say it.
Rhazgar doesn’t respond. He ladles a second bowl of porridge, brings it to the table, and sits across from me. Not close. Just… across. He cups his hands around his own mug, gazes over my left shoulder, and doesn’t ask anything at all.
I don’t say more. He doesn’t ask. The broth simmers. Somewhere outside, a door opens and closes, someone else is up early, moving across the compound. The breadboard sits between us. I cut another piece without thinking about it.
After a while, I eat the second bowl.
When I stand to go, he remains at the table, mug in both hands, giving no indication that the conversation was anything other than complete.
“Rhazgar.”
He looks at me.
“The bread,” I say. “It’s good.”
Something moves at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. Close enough. “I know,” he says.
I drive back into town. Come in through the Taproom’s side door just after two, which is later than I’ve arrived in eight years, and Walt is behind the bar going through the delivery manifest. Doesn’t look up.
“The Grim Dark came in short,” he says. “Six cases instead of eight. Grulk’s going to have opinions.”
“Nothing new. Grulk has opinions about everything.”
“More than usual this time.” Walt sets the manifest down and picks up his coffee. He’s somewhere in his late sixties, and he has the look of a man who has already decided what matters. He doesn’t miss much, and he doesn’t say more than he means.
“You look like a male who didn’t sleep,” he says.
“Four hours.”
“Hm.” He drinks his coffee. This is Walt expressing a complete opinion.
I go behind the bar and start the morning inventory. Walt stays where he is at the far end, his usual position.
After a few minutes, he says, without a discernible inflection, “Been thinking about the deed.”
I look up. “The deed.”
“My name’s on it. Been on it for twenty-six years.
” He turns his coffee mug in a slow circle.
“I’m sixty-eight. The bar runs itself at this point, which is to say, you run it and I watch you run it and occasionally I say something about the Grim Dark order.
You pay me a percentage of revenue until we’re square.
The bar makes enough. We can do it formal when the time is right.
” A pause. “A male who’s just passing through doesn’t need to own anything. ”
I’m still.
“A male who’s staying,” Walt says, “needs something to stay for.”
He finishes his coffee, sets the mug in the rack, and picks up the delivery manifest again. The subject is closed in the way Walt closes subjects, not ended, just returned to wherever it lives until the other person is ready for it.
I finish the inventory.
I don’t say anything because I don’t have anything to say that is ready to be said. But I file what he said in the place where I put true things. I work the bar through the afternoon with the melody turning over in the back of my head.
Grulk arrives at 6:15, which is forty-five minutes before the doors open, because Grulk does not experience the concept of closing time or opening time or any time that differs from Grulk time.
I hear him before I see him, the distinctive carrying volume of a HammerFall orc who has decided to share his current interior state with the surrounding zip code.
“Kragen.” He drops onto a stool. “I heard a rumor.”
“You hear a lot of things,” I say. I put the Grim Dark in front of him, and he wraps a hand around the glass without looking at it.
“About you,” he says. “And a certain instrument maker.” His expression is one I have seen before. It is the expression of a male who has information and considers that information to be a gift he is now presenting to you. “I heard you went to dinner.”
I wipe down the bar. “Where did you hear that?”
“Delia. Or someone who knows Delia. The precise chain is not important.” He waves a hand.
“What is important is that I am very happy about this.” He says this with the volume and sincerity of a male announcing something at a civic event.
“I have been hopeful, Kragen. I told you. I said: this one. I knew.”
“You knew nothing,” I say. “You guessed.”
“I knew.” He is immovable on this point, as he is on all points. “How did it go? Tell me about the dinner. Tell me everything.”
“The chicken-fried steak was exceptional.”
“And after the chicken-fried steak.”
“The pie was also good.”
Grulk stares at me. “Kragen.”
“The crust in particular. Flakey.”
“Grulk.”
“—and what it says about her that she said yes—”
“Grulk.”
He stops. Looks at me. I look at him.
“It went well,” I say.
His face opens, wide, warm, unrestrained. Like Grulk. “Good,” he says. “Good.” He lifts his glass. “To the perfect gift and its obligations. And to chicken-fried steak.”
“Don’t,” I say.
“And to Kragen,” he says, undeterred, “who is StillWater in all the ways he doesn’t know and some of the ways he does.”
He drinks. I wipe down the bar. The doors open at seven and the room fills up. Between sets, Grulk holds court at the bar with the joyful volume of a male who has decided things are going well in the universe and intends to notify the universe accordingly.
I want to evaporate. I do not evaporate. I play the second set.
At 12:30, after close, I text her.
It takes me longer than it should to write something I’ve been thinking about since I woke up.
The problem is that everything I compose sounds like more than I’m ready to put in a text or less than what last night actually was, and I’m standing in a closed bar with a guitar at my side and a phone in my hand trying to find the register that is neither too much nor too little.
It turns out that register is harder to find in a text box than it is in a song.
I send: I keep thinking about last night.
I put the phone in my pocket. Finish locking up. Walk to the car, put the guitar in the passenger seat, and am standing at the driver’s door when the phone buzzes.
I glance at the message for a moment, the brevity of it, the way it says exactly what it says and nothing it doesn’t, and my chest shifts in a way I’ve been feeling for two weeks and haven’t found the word for.
Me too.
I sit in the car for a while with the phone in my hand and the Missouri dark around me and I think about a woman who builds things for strangers in Auckland and plays her grandmother’s songs in lamplit rooms and kissed me last night like she meant it.
I think: I know what the song is.
I think: I don’t know what to do with that yet.
I put the car in drive.