17. Chapter Seventeen #3
“Bar kitchen. Walt hired a real cook for about six months in year two, and I paid attention.” He watches the sandwiches, not me. “Useful thing, paying attention.”
“It is,” I say.
He glances back at me over his shoulder when he says it, and I look out the window.
He plates the sandwiches, wipes the pan, adds more butter, and cracks both eggs one-handed. A few minutes later, he carries both plates to the table and sits across from me.
“Croque Madame,” he says.
I look at it.
“That’s what it’s called,” he says. “Ham, cheese, egg on top. French.”
“I was going to make a ham sandwich,” I say.
“I know,” he says. “This is better.”
The egg is perfect. The cheese has been properly melted and not just approximated. He acts as if it’s a normal thing to produce in someone else’s kitchen on a Sunday afternoon.
“Okay,” I say, after the first bite.
“Mm.”
“This is considerably better than what I was going to make.”
“The bar for what you were going to make was not high.”
“I had a system,” I say. “It was efficient.”
“It was bread and ham.”
“Bread and ham has served this family for generations.”
He almost smiles. Eats his sandwich. The kitchen is bright and warm, the way it gets in the early afternoon when the sun comes through the south window and lands on my grandmother’s oak table.
The domesticity of this moment, him in my kitchen, my hip resting, the food good, is not something I examine too closely because I suspect it would rearrange me if I did.
He’s washing the cast iron correctly, without soap, when he says, without turning around, “I left my guitar in the car.”
I know what he’s asking. “The dulcimer’s in the living room,” I say.
He dries his hands on the dish towel. Goes to get his guitar.
We end up on the porch. This is not a decision I remember making.
It’s just where we end up, the way the porch is where things end up on this property.
He’s in the far chair with his guitar. I’m on the porch swing with the dulcimer, which I haven’t played outside in years.
The afternoon has gone gold again, the way it does in Missouri in late June when the heat has peaked and started its slow retreat, and the workshop is a familiar shape in the trees and the purple coneflower heads along the fence line are just visible from here.
He plays a melody first. I don’t know it; it’s not a bar song, not a performance song, it’s still finding itself, picking its way through a series of intervals like a person thinking out loud. I watch his hands.
After a while, I play too, not in response, just alongside.
My grandmother’s song, the one with no name, the one I played the night we came back from Delia’s.
It doesn’t go with what he’s playing and then it does, the way two things that aren’t in the same key can still find each other if the person playing knows how to listen. He adjusts. I adjust.
We play for a while. Then we don’t. The porch swing moves in the late afternoon air, and the creek is a sound at the edge of hearing and neither of us is in a hurry. His hands rest on the guitar, still. Mine rest on the dulcimer.
“That song,” he says after a moment. “The one you played the other night.”
“The one with no name.”
“She made it up?”
“More or less. It built up over years, I think. She’d change a phrase, alter the timing, let parts fall away, and eventually it was just what it was.” I look at the dulcimer under my hands. “She never wrote it down. Said it was the kind of thing that only stays if you keep playing it.”
He takes a moment. Then, “I’ve been carrying a melody.”
I wait.
“Since the morning I picked up the dulcimer. I don’t have the whole thing yet.” He looks out at the property: the trees, the late light, the volunteer irises that were planted decades ago and keep coming up year after year. “I think it’s been waiting for a place to land.”
He doesn’t say more. I don’t ask. Some things announce themselves when they’re ready and asking doesn’t speed it up.
The afternoon settles around us. The creek runs. The light goes from gold to amber, and the shadows from the oaks stretch across the grass and the porch swing moves and the house settles into itself the way old buildings settle, a small sound, easy, just the house breathing.
He leaves at six, when the light has gone low and long and the fireflies have started up in the field below the garden.
He takes the guitar case from the porch, goes down a step, then comes back up.
I’m standing in the doorway and he stops in front of me and gives me that look, the one that doesn’t perform anything.
Then he kisses me, brief and certain, and leaves.
I stand in the doorway for a while. The dulcimer is still warm from my hands.
His taillights reach the end of the drive and disappear, and the fireflies are coming up in the field.
I’m aware, the way you’re aware of weather coming in before it arrives, that the shape of things has shifted and I am not going to be able to unchange it.
I go inside.