29. Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Kragen
She’s not there when I reach for her.
My hand finds the space where she was and I lie still for a moment registering it and then I know—workshop, obviously, the morning light coming through the curtains and the sound of the property waking up outside and her gone before I noticed she was going, which is exactly who she is.
I’m not anything except awake in her grandmother’s bed in the July morning, the ceiling with its hairline crack in the corner, her pillow still carrying her scent.
I lie here for another minute because there’s no reason not to.
Then I get up.
The house in the morning is different from the house at night.
At night it’s amber and full and close—the lamplight catching the lace, the quilts over the chairs, everything warm and contained.
In the morning, it’s open. The light comes through the windows differently, finding the grain of the oak floors and the dust motes and the places where generations of living have worn the finish soft.
It’s the same house. It’s entirely different.
I come down the stairs with my hand on the newel post—oak, old, turned smooth in the way wood gets when the same hands have touched the same place for a century. I feel the grain of it under my palm. File it.
In the living room, I stop.
The piano is against the wall between the two windows, an upright, dark wood gone nearly black with age, the kind of instrument that has been in this room so long it’s become part of the architecture. I’ve walked past it a dozen times. This morning I cross to it.
I press one key. Middle C, I think, or close to it. The sound it makes is slightly imperfect from age and humidity and probably decades without tuning, and it is the best sound I’ve heard all morning, which is saying something given what I woke up remembering.
I want to learn this instrument. I have wanted to learn it since the first time I stood in this room and saw it.
There was not much call for pianos at the orc compound—one battered upright at the community center, keys yellowed, no one who could teach it properly, a human instrument that was donated by some organization.
I’m going to ask Honey where to find a teacher. After I figure out what we’re going to do about the stool.
I look at the piano stool. It is, in the kindest possible assessment, a Victorian artifact with claw feet gripping small glass balls and a spindle mechanism for adjusting the height, built for a parlor and a person of entirely different dimensions than myself.
It is also clearly something that has been in this room for as long as the piano and possibly longer. I am not going to simply replace it.
The workshop will have a solution. Honey will have a solution. She has a solution for everything, including, apparently, me.
I touch the corner of the lace curtain on my way to the kitchen.
The fabric is soft from washing, the pattern intricate, each repeat exactly like the last because her great-grandmother made it that way, by hand, in this house, before anyone now living was born.
I think about the song. I think about the verse I wrote and whether it came anywhere near the reality of standing in this room with this lace between my fingers.
It didn’t. Nothing could.
I go upstairs to shower. I’m thinking I’ll make coffee after, take it out to the workshop, and find her at the bench with whatever she’s working on.
Halfway through, I hear the hammering.
I come downstairs in a towel, my hair dripping.
She’s on the stepstool in the living room with the hammer in her hand. She turns when she hears me, and I stop in the doorway and look at the wall.
My grandmother’s dulcimer, she said once, has been on that wall since before I can remember. It’s there now, in the center, where it’s always been. But centered on a piece of good walnut are three plain iron hooks—her grandmother’s dulcimer hanging between two empty ones.
I look at her.
She looks back at me from the stepstool with the hammer in her hand, and her expression is the one she gets when she’s done something she considers obvious and is waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.
I look at the wall again. Two extra hooks. Her grandmother’s dulcimer between them.
I turn around and go out the back door at a pace that is not quite running.
The gravel drive is not comfortable under bare feet.
I don’t care. My car is where I left it last night—her driveway, the oaks throwing their morning shadows west—and I get the dulcimer and guitar from the back seat and I am back across the gravel and through the kitchen door in under two minutes, slightly out of breath, ducking the frame, a towel and two instruments and nothing else.
She’s still on the stepstool.
She is, I notice, trying not to smile.
I hand her the dulcimer first—velara flowers and all, the most pink thing I’ve ever owned, which she made me and which is therefore hers as much as it’s mine—and she hangs it on the left hook with the care she gives all instruments, both hands, checking the weight of it. Then I hand her the guitar.
She hangs it on the right.
She steps down from the stool, and we both look at the wall.
Her grandmother’s dulcimer in the center. My velara dulcimer on the left, guitar on the right. Three instruments on a wall in a house that has been in her family for four generations, hung on hooks made from workshop scrap and plain iron, which is not beautiful and is also exactly right.
“Gerald looks good there,” she says. “Like he belongs.”
I put my hand on the back of her neck.
She leans into it.
“The stool,” I say.
She looks up at me.
“For the piano. I want to learn it. But I’m going to need you to look at the stool first.”
She looks at the stool. She looks at me. She does the math.
“Workshop,” she says.
“I thought so.”
“After coffee.”
“Absolutely, after coffee.”
She’s still looking at the wall. Then, without turning around, “You should talk to Walt about the bar.”
I go still.
“You know what you want,” she says. “He knows it too. He’s just waiting for you to say it out loud.”
She goes to the kitchen. I look at the wall one more time: the three instruments, the walnut scrap, the plain iron hooks she made in the early morning while I was sleeping in her grandmother’s bed.
And I think of the word zhorgul, which has no English equivalent, a StillWater word for the moment you understand that a place has decided to keep you.
I follow her to the kitchen.