He picks up the board and holds it the way he held the inherited dulcimer—lightly, aware of what it is. “What am I listening for?”
“Tap it. Center of the board, one knuckle.”
He does. The tone that comes back is clear and even, a good sustain.
“That’s what you want,” I say. “A board that already knows how to sing.”
He taps it again, listening. Sets it back carefully. “I’ll trust you on the rest.”
We stay at the wall a few minutes longer—I show him the walnut I have in stock for the back and sides, explain what the figure in the grain means for how the finished instrument will look in different light. He asks good questions.
By the time he leaves, I’ve talked more than I normally talk during a client visit. I notice this standing in the workshop doorway watching his car go around the curve in the drive.
Then I go back inside and cross to the far end of the workbench where he set his cup down without leaving a ring.
The last person I let in here, into this part of things, the grandmother and the dulcimer and what the hip injury actually cost, had been kind about it in the beginning. When it was fresh and required kindness. He was less interested once it stopped being temporary and became the permanent condition of things. The way I have to shift my weight when my hip is hurting and the cold mornings and the career that wasn’t coming back. He left about six months after my injury. I understood it.
What I drew from it was less useful: the quiet conclusion, built up slowly over months, that the version of me the injury hadleft behind was something a person could tolerate for a while, but not choose to stay for. I’ve never said that out loud. I don’t intend to. It didn’t mean I was in a hurry to repeat the experiment.
I uncover the fretboard with its half-finished diamonds and pick up the burning pen.
Later, when I go inside for the night, I make tea with the image of large green hands clutching two steaming cups of coffee.
Chapter Eight
Honey
The inherited dulcimer goes home on a Wednesday. The client drives out from Springfield, parks in the gravel drive, and stands at my workbench turning it in her hands the way people turn things when they’re afraid to find what they’re looking for. She finds the repair. Looks up at me.
“You can see it,” she says. Not a complaint, a question.
“Up close, if you know where to look. From across the room, from the mantel—it’s gone.”
She holds it at arm’s length. Takes it in. The tension in her jaw releases. “That’s exactly right,” she says. “That’s what I wanted.”
After she leaves, I stand in the workshop for a while, the bench clear for the first time in weeks, and then I pull Kragen’s file.
The wood he picked is still the one I would have chosen.
I start with the templates.
His neck width requires new calculations. If I scale only the neck without adjusting the body proportions, the instrument will look and resonate wrong. I work through the ratios on paper first, just as my teacher in North Carolina taught me: understand what you’re building before you touch the wood. An hour of calculations, then another hour checking everything. “Measure twice, cut once,” my mentor said. I build the new neck template from scratch, check it three times, and set it aside.
Then I select the back and side wood from my walnut stock—the piece with texture in the grain, the kind that looks almost plain until the light catches it and then looks like water moving.
The building is clean and absorbing, the way structural work always is. I cut the sides and bend them over the bending iron, the walnut going soft and cooperative in the heat, taking the curves of the waist without complaint. The kerfed linings fit into place. I tap the spruce top and listen to it, trying to find out what it already knows about itself.
Two weeks in, I text him when the structural work is done.
Me:Started your commission last week. Neck templates took longer than expected—new territory for me at this scale. Body is complete. Ready for finishing work.
Kragen:New territory meaning you’ve never built for someone my size before.
Me:Correct. I’ve built for large hands before, but not that large. The fret spacing was a genuine puzzle.
Kragen:I’ve been told my hands are a lot to deal with.
Kragen:In the context of guitar playing. That’s what I meant.
