24. Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Four
Honey
By the time my tires hit the gravel, I’m already on the other side of what Grulk told me at the bar.
This is something I know about myself. I process fast and I process alone, and I do it in motion, which means that twenty-three miles of Missouri two-lane was enough time to have the conversation, reach the conclusion, and file it in the place where I keep decisions.
The drive is behind me. The driveway is under my tires.
Nothing has changed: the porch, the butter churn nobody churns butter in, the workshop lamp I left on that I’m going to have to walk back out and turn off.
The creek is running. I can hear it from the car.
I sit for a moment with my hands on the wheel.
The afternoon light is coming down through the oaks at an angle that makes everything look like it’s being illuminated from inside.
The property looks the same as it looked this morning.
My eye catches the ramshackle side of the workshop facing the drive.
The porch where I have drunk approximately ten thousand cups of coffee.
It looks like mine. All of it. Built and tended and learned across the years until I know every sound it makes in every kind of weather.
It looks like mine, and it is mine, and I built my whole life inside it, and right now, standing in front of all of it, I am aware of how much of it I built alone.
I get out of the car and go inside.
The house greets me as always with the smells of old wood and the lace curtains lifting in the cross-breeze from the open windows and my grandmother’s dulcimer on the wall in the living room, right where it’s been since before I can remember, right where it will be long after I’m gone.
Four generations of women in these walls, and I am the fourth, and the house holds all of them without effort, the way it holds everything, the way it has always held me.
I stand in the living room doorway for a moment.
Then I make tea I don’t drink and go back out to turn off the workshop lamp.
As I’m crossing the yard, he texts: Just making sure you got home okay. It’s a considerate text. The kind a person sends when they’re trying to give you room and can’t quite make themselves not reach out.
I put the phone in my pocket and open the workshop door.
My most recent commission is three-quarters done.
I discover this standing at the bench in the early evening, looking at the mostly finished repair with the clarity that comes after a day when everything else has been cleared away. Three-quarters done. Maybe four more sessions of good work. And after that, nothing in the queue.
I go through my inbox. Three inquiries, two of which have gone cold from my slow response time over the last few weeks. One serious commission request I haven’t answered. I look at it for a moment, and then I close the laptop.
The workshop is quiet. The smell of it—char and wood and oil—is the smell of my whole adult life, practically speaking, and normally I find it steadying. Tonight it is just a smell.
I open the laptop again.
The kit end of my business has always been the least interesting part.
I know this about myself, and I don’t apologize for it.
The kits are entry-level: pre-cut pieces, pre-drilled holes, sanded and fitted so that someone with no woodworking experience and a weekend afternoon can assemble something that will make sound.
Functional. A reasonable introduction to the instrument.
I sell them on the website at a modest markup, and I fulfill the orders, and I don’t think much about them.
It’s a product that basically sells itself.
Research shows that somewhere between forty and sixty percent of the people who buy them never finish them.
The pieces sit in a closet. The dream of learning the dulcimer turns out to be more appealing than the reality of sanding joints on a Tuesday evening.
I have no judgment about this. I just know it’s true.
What I also know is that if I drop the price far enough and push a newsletter, I will have more orders than I can fill in a week.
The work is repetitive and absorbing in the way that repetitive work is absorbing—hands moving through a familiar sequence, brain occupied just enough to stay quiet.
Not craft work. Not the thing I do when I am fully myself at a workbench. Something closer to the opposite.
I’m going to be inundated. That’s the idea.
I draft the newsletter in about twenty minutes.
I know the tone—warm, direct, here’s an opportunity—and I know my subscriber list well enough to know what will land.
The pricing comes easily. I won’t be selling at a loss, but enough of a discount that people who’ve been considering it will click through.
I attach the coupon code, then scan the draft.
The thing about this plan is that it is going to work.
I will push send and by tomorrow morning I’ll have thirty orders, and by the end of the week I’ll have a hundred, and I will spend the next four weeks doing the least interesting work of my professional life and I will be too tired in the evenings to think about anything and that is not an accident.
I push send.
Then I close the laptop, go inside, and don’t sleep well.
The orders come in the way I said they would.
Thirty by morning. Sixty by noon. I pull the kit inventory, do the math, order more supplies, and set an expected fulfillment window in the auto-response.
My hands know the sequence. Sand. Check.
Pack. Label. My brain settles into the rhythm the way it knows how to, the days acquiring a shape that is almost like purpose.
I open the shallow drawer under the bench twice the first week without meaning to.
The first time I don’t even register what I’m doing until my hand is already on the edge of it. I close it and go back to the kit I’m working on. The second time I open it and look at the napkin for approximately three seconds, then I close it again and go inside and make dinner.
The creek keeps moving. On Thursday morning, the wild turkeys scuffle through the yard, and I watch them through the workshop window while I’m sanding.
I do not think about the last time someone stood next to me and watched them.
I do not think about his completely disproportionate reaction, or the brief loss of composure, or the way he laughed at himself after.
The joints need sanding. I think about the joints.
He texts again, I’d like to talk when you’re ready. Seven words. No pressure in them, or he’s tried to take the pressure out, which is its own kind of pressure. I don’t answer it.
At some point during the second week, I pick up my grandmother’s dulcimer in the evenings, the way I used to before any of this started—the unnamed song, the one she made up, the one I learned by hearing it until it went from her hands into mine.
I play until I stop thinking about what I’m playing. This is the whole point.
I know the difference between acceptance and disappearing myself.
What I’m doing right now is buying time.
The kits are the kits. They don’t mean anything, they’re just occupation, hands moving through sequences while the rest of me gets to somewhere I can function from.
This is not ideal, but this is what I have.
I’ve done this before under worse circumstances and I know how it goes: you get through it and eventually the ground comes back up and you stand on it again.
Not the same ground. Different shape. But ground.
By the fourth week, the napkin is still in the drawer.
I’ve opened it eleven times that I’ve counted and three or four I probably haven’t.
I know what the napkin looks like without taking it out.
Five petals, slightly irregular, the way real flowers are irregular.
A loose cluster on a forked stem. Drawn in under two minutes from a memory of a hillside on another world, left on my bench because he forgot to take it with him.
I can’t throw it away. But I can return it. He drew it. It’s his. Walk in on a weekday when there’s no stage, no crowd, hand it over, walk out. Clean. Logistical. A transaction that closes rather than abandons.
There is a moment, one Tuesday evening, sitting on the porch with the dulcimer in my lap and the oaks throwing their shadows down the hill, where it occurs to me I could text him that I’m coming.
No.
I take the napkin out of the drawer.
The pen lines are still dark and exact, the five velara blooming in their loose cluster just as he left them, just as he remembered them from a hillside he hasn’t stood on in eight years. He drew this in under two minutes. I burned them across an entire soundboard.
I fold the napkin carefully and put it in the front pocket of my bag. The pocket that closes. Not the one where things fall out.
He won’t be expecting me, and that’s the point. Twenty-three miles is twenty-three miles in either direction.
I go back out to the workshop and sand twelve more joints and pack ten more kits and the evening comes down the hill and the lamp burns and I do not examine the plan any further because the plan is made and that’s enough.