28. Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Honey
The morning comes in through the curtains the way it always does—slow and golden: the light finding the lace first and then the floor and then everything else in the room. I lie still for a moment and listen to Kragen breathe.
He’s completely out. Seven feet of orc in my grandmother’s bed, one arm still loosely around me even in sleep.
I gaze at him for a moment in the morning light—his face slack and unguarded, the dark hair against my pillow—and feel something settle in my chest that I think is going to be there for a very long time.
Then I slip out from under his arm and go to the workshop.
I have something to make.
The fence line catches my eye on the way across the yard. The coneflowers and black-eyed Susans that have been crowding the path all summer are cut back cleanly, the right height, not hacked at. Someone who knew what they were doing and wasn’t making a production of it.
Grulk.
I don’t know how he knew. With Grulk, I’ve stopped asking that question. I wasn’t holding a grudge. Still, this sands out the rough spot.
I go to the workshop.
The workshop in the early morning is its own kind of world: the smell of it, the quality of the light through the single west window, the familiar quiet before the crow up the hill starts making his opinions known.
I know every inch of this space. My grandfather built it, and my grandmother let it go to seed, and I cleaned it out nine years ago and made it mine. It has been mine every morning since.
This morning I’m making something for someone else to put in it.
Not in it. In the house. In the living room, on the wall, where I can see it from the kitchen doorway, next to my grandmother’s dulcimer where it belongs.
I find the scrap wood first—a piece of good walnut left from a commission, wider than I need, but that’s fine; it’ll be sturdier. Then the hooks. I keep a supply of them for hanging tools, plain iron, the kind that will hold weight without complaint. I find two that match and set them on the bench.
I know what I’m doing. No point examining it too closely.
It’s perfectly clear. He has a guitar. He has a dulcimer.
They live in his car because he has nowhere to put them in an apartment he’s been living in like someone who moved in recently and hasn’t gotten around to the rest of it. And I have a wall.
It’s a practical solution. That’s all.
I mount the first hook on the scrap wood and then the second, spacing them the way I’d space them if I were hanging tools, which is to say exactly right. I hold the piece up and look at it. Plain. Functional. The kind of thing you make when you want something to last rather than to impress.
Then I imagine how it will look on the wall next to my dulcimer and realize I’ve got this wrong. I set the board down and add a third hook, centered between the other two.
The result is deeply satisfying.
I take it inside and hear the shower running. Good. I don’t think he’ll hear me hammering.
My grandmother’s dulcimer comes down from the wall carefully, with both hands, the way it always comes down.
I hold it for a moment. The wood is dark from decades of handling, its grain worn smooth under my fingers in the places where her hands always went.
She played it every Sunday. It went from her hands into mine across more Sunday evenings than I can count.
I put it on the couch and get the stepstool from the kitchen.
I remove the hook from the wall and then find the studs the way I always find them—by feel, by knowledge of this house, by the resonant sound a wall makes when you knock on it in the right place.
Three screws. Level. I check it twice. Then I hang my grandmother’s dulcimer in the center, where it has always been and where it will stay.
I lean back and look at the wall.
Two empty hooks. One dulcimer, centered. Space on either side for what’s coming.