Chapter Fourteen
Kragen
The invitation was easy. The waiting was not. She was in the workshop when I called. I could tell by the quiet behind her voice, and I said I’d like to take her to dinner sometime if she was willing. There was a pause I’ve spent more time than I’d like thinking about since. Then she said there’s a place she likes, past her property, and she’d text me the address.
She texted the address twenty minutes later. I took that as a good sign.
While waiting for the dulcimer to be delivered, I watched countless YouTube videos. Now that I have it, I’ve been playing the dulcimer in the evenings instead of the guitar. The tuning comes easily—the intervals are familiar enough. The fretting hand is the problem. Decades of muscle memory reaching forpositions this instrument doesn’t have. Relearning how to be a beginner is not a feeling I’ve had in a long time.
I pull up her drive on a Thursday evening, the Missouri summer is in full effect, the oaks throwing long shadows across the gravel, the air sultry and thick with the smell of cut hay and creek water. This is my fourth time here now. The sound of the place is becoming familiar.
By the time I step out of the car and start toward the porch, the front door is already opening.
She steps outside.
I stop walking.
She looks the same as she always looks: brown hair with a jaw-length wave she doesn’t fight, dark eyes, the kind of stillness that isn’t absence but attention. And also entirely different. She’s dressed for an evening out, and she’s walking toward me across the porch of her grandmother’s house in the early summer light, and I forget what I was about to say.
She stops at the top of the porch steps. We’re nearly eye level, which is new, and neither of us says anything about it.
Neither of us speaks. She looks at me with the focused attention she gives everything she’s trying to assess, and I look back, and the evening sits around us doing nothing helpful.
“The drive to the restaurant is about twenty minutes,” she says.
“I know.” I looked it up after she texted me the address.
She nods. Her expression suggests she’s aware that was not a useful thing to say and has decided to live with it. I find this enormously reassuring.
“You look nice,” I say, because she does and because I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
Color pinkens her face. “Thank you,” she says, perhaps quieter than she meant to. Then she straightens slightly, as if she’s correcting for something. It’s the most human thing I’ve ever seen her do, and I have to turn away before she notices me noticing.
I offer her my arm, and she takes it. At the spot where the drive dips slightly, she shifts her weight left without thinking about it. It’s familiar. Has been for weeks. She favors the left side there without even realizing it. I say nothing. Of course I don’t.
I match her pace, and we keep walking. At the car, I open the door for her and she gets in.
In the car, she’s composed and careful in the way she gets when she’s keeping herself on a short leash. She asks how long I’ve worked at the bar.
“Eight years,” I tell her.
“That’s a long time.”
“It is.”
She looks out the window.
I don’t ask what she’s thinking.
Her fingers are wrapped around the coffee cup. Not tightly. Just enough that I notice.
Some conversations need the right room.
For a while, neither of us says anything.
The place she’s chosen is deeper into the hills, the kind of road that makes you wonder if you’ve taken a wrong turn and then delivers you somewhere that justifies all of it. Delia’s sits at a crossroads where two county roads meet, a converted farmhouse with a hand-painted sign and a gravel lot with a dozen pickups parked there. The screen door looks like the original screen door. From inside, even from the lot, I can hear music—fiddle and guitar, something with a two-step underneath it, not loud yet but present, the band warming into the evening.
I’m already deciding I like it before we’ve gotten out of the car.
