17. Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Seventeen
Honey
He texts Saturday night, after close.
Haven’t seen your property yet. Would you show me sometime?
I read it standing in my kitchen in my socks. The workshop lamp is off, and the house is quiet and the clock on the stove says 12:13, and I know what the text is and he knows what the text is and neither of us is saying so.
I type: Tomorrow works if you’re free.
I send it before I think about it too hard. His reply comes in under two minutes.
What time?
We settle on ten. I put my phone down and look at the kitchen and think about the fact that I just invited a seven-foot orc to walk my property at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning. I feel a flicker of nerves, or whatever sits adjacent to nerves, that I’m not going to name in my kitchen at midnight.
I go to bed. I don’t think about it.
I think about it.
He arrives at five past ten in the same car he always drives. He’s in jeans and a Henley the color of old wood, and the overall effect is unfair enough that I set the thought aside immediately. “Good morning,” he says, coming up the porch steps.
“Morning.” I have coffee in a thermos and the old quilt from the cedar chest over one arm because the ground near the creek stays damp and I’ve been doing this long enough to know my hip and damp ground are not friends. “Ready?”
He looks at the quilt. Then at me. “You planned this.”
“I planned coffee and something to sit on,” I say. “Don’t read into it.”
He almost smiles. Takes the thermos and quilt. We go.
The property unfolds the way it always does when I walk it, familiar in the way things are when they’ve been in you long enough to stop being scenery and start being just the way the world looks.
The ridge to the east catches the morning light first. Coneflowers and black-eyed Susans along the fence line have come in thick this year; they crowd toward the path in a way I’ve been meaning to cut back and haven’t.
The old apple trees are past their bloom, but still green and full.
The creek runs clear, and the grass is long enough to bend in whatever breeze comes off the hills.
He doesn’t talk much, which I’ve come to understand is not shyness or discomfort. He’s looking. Really looking, the way he looked at the wood stock the first time he came to the workshop, like he’s taking inventory. I don’t mind being watched like that. Not by him.
“How much land?” he asks at some point.
“Forty acres. My grandmother’s grandmother bought the original parcel. It’s been added to a couple of times since.” I gesture east. “The creek marks the property line on that side. The ridge on the other.”
“Has it always been women?”
I consider. “Mostly. There were husbands, but they were… adjacent. The land stayed with the women.”
He nods at that as if it makes sense to him. Like he’s filed it somewhere.
The turkeys come out of the treeline near the east fence without warning.
There are four of them, big, dignified in their ridiculousness, absurd in the way wild turkeys are absurd, all wattle and indignation.
They emerge from the brush and proceed across the path with the absolute conviction of creatures who have never once questioned their right to be wherever they are.
The lead bird makes a sound. Less a gobble than a declaration.
Kragen stops walking.
Not a small stop. A full-body, both-feet-planted stop, the way you stop when the alarm fires before the brain has caught up.
He’s half a step behind me and suddenly he’s very still in a way that has nothing to do with his StillWater nature and everything to do with the fact that four turkeys just materialized from the brush at knee height and he did not hear them coming, which should not be possible for a male who turned toward my driveway thirty seconds before my neighbor’s truck appeared at the end of it.
“They’re turkeys,” I say.
“I know what they are.” He hasn’t moved.
The lead turkey regards him with one eye. Makes the sound again. Then it advances with the steady confidence of a creature entirely certain it can take him in a fight.
“It’s looking at me,” Kragen says.
“They do that.”
“Why is it coming closer?”
“Curiosity, probably. They’re not going to do anything.”
The turkey takes another step. Kragen takes one back. The turkey tilts its head. I put my hand over my mouth.
“Don’t,” he says.
I am already laughing. I don’t mean to and I can’t help it.
The image of this male, who has to duck through my workshop door, who moves through the world like he was built for more of it than exists, retreating incrementally from a fifteen-pound bird with a perplexed expression on his face.
I laugh like I haven’t laughed at anything in a while. Properly, from somewhere real.
“The hearing,” I manage. “What happened to your keen orc sense of hearing?”
“I was distracted,” he says with great dignity.
“By what?”
A beat. “The light on the ridge.”
I laugh harder. The turkeys, collectively unimpressed, move on across the path and disappear into the brush on the other side with the same absolute unhurried conviction with which they arrived. The whole incident takes maybe forty-five seconds.
When I look back at Kragen, he’s watching them go with an expression working its way from undignified to something else. Then it arrives.
He laughs, low and a little rueful, directed at himself rather than the turkeys. Not the easy social laugh he uses with strangers. An actual one.
I look at him in the full morning light and see him as though it’s the first time.
Amber eyes creased at the corners, the laugh in them, those dimples.
I didn’t know he had dimples; this is new information.
And the sun catching the blue-black of his hair and the way his tusks catch the light, which I have been trying not to think about since approximately his second visit.
He looks, standing in my pasture laughing at himself over a turkey, like the most handsome thing I have seen in a very long time.
I glance away before he catches me looking.
“In my defense,” he says, “they are enormous.”
“They’re average-sized turkeys.”
“I was told Missouri was peaceful.”
“Missouri is peaceful,” I say. “You just met its welcome committee.”
He picks up the thermos he set down at some point during the turkey incident, and hands it back to me. “Where’s the creek?” he asks, like a male eager to change the subject.
“This way,” I say. What I don’t say: I’m going to think about those dimples for a long time.
The creek runs through a low spot at the south end of the property, shaded by a double row of old oaks that my grandmother’s grandmother planted, and which have been doing what they want ever since.
The water is clear and low this time of year, running over the limestone shelf that surfaces here and there along the bank.
It smells like water and shade and green things, which is a smell I have had in the back of my mind since I was small enough that my grandmother held my hand on this path.
I spread the quilt on a flat spot above the bank, level enough, dry, the roots of the nearest oak making a low natural backrest. Kragen folds himself down onto it with the economy of a very large person who has learned to manage his dimensions, ending up propped on his elbows with his legs extended, easy and unhurried, like he’s been sitting by this creek his whole life.
I sit. The hip registers the ground, notes it, and subsides. I don’t let it show. I’ve had almost ten years of practice at not letting it show.
The person I was with when it happened left about six months into my recovery. He said it wasn’t about the injury. I knew it was.
We pass the thermos back and forth. The creek moves over the limestone in the low bell-like sound it makes in summer when it’s running clear. Somewhere in the oaks, a woodpecker works with patient, rhythmic focus.
“The dulcimer on the wall,” he says. “Your grandmother’s. You told me about the injury, but you didn’t say how she came into it, or how you did.”
I look at the water. He already knows the outline of it; I told him the morning he brought coffee. He doesn’t know the worst parts.
“It wasn’t right away,” I say. “After the injury, I was in a lot of pain for a while… not just physical. One afternoon I was feeling particularly sorry for myself, which I’d earned, I think, even if I was tired of it.
I still couldn’t see past that week. Couldn’t see any future at all, just the same day repeating over and over with no improvement in sight. ”
I focus on the cattails on the far bank for a moment, then admit, “I threw a plate with food on it against the wall. Not at anyone, not dramatically. I was alone in my room and I just… threw it. Hard.”
I can feel him go still. Not the turkey stillness, not the startled stillness. The kind that means the story landed somewhere unprotected.
“My grandmother came in. She saw the plate on the floor, pottery shards, mashed potatoes, and gravy. She picked it up. Put the pieces into the wastebasket. Didn’t say anything about the throwing or the wall or what it meant that I’d thrown it.
Just cleaned it up.” I pause. “And then she sat down on the edge of the bed, and she said, ‘I’ve been meaning to teach you the dulcimer for years. I thought you might want to learn now’. ”
The creek runs. The grass rustles.
“She’d been waiting,” I say. “All those years while I was training, she’d been waiting for when I’d have time. She never pushed it. She just… waited. And then the minute I had nothing but time and nowhere to put myself, there she was with the thing she’d been holding for me.”
I stop talking. The story is finished. I’ve never told it that way before, all the way through, without stopping to manage how it lands. I focus on the tiny spill of white water over the rocks.