Honey pushes through the screen door ahead of me, and I follow her in. A woman behind the counter—fifties, gray braid, apron with a rooster on it—looks up, and her whole face changes.
“Honey.” She comes around the counter with her arms open. “Lord, it’s been a month.”
“More like six weeks,” Honey says into the hug. Then she pulls back and turns toward me. She glances at me before she startsthe introductions, quick enough that I might have missed it if I weren’t already paying attention. “Delia, this is Kragen. Kragen, this is Delia. She’s been feeding my family since before I was born.”
Delia looks up at me. Then up a little more. Then she sticks out her hand and I shake it. She says, “Well,” in a tone that contains an entire paragraph.
“Good to meet you,” I say.
“I imagine it is,” she says. Honey presses her lips together in a way that is definitely her not laughing. Delia waves us toward a booth by the window. “Your mom’s favorite booth,” she says to Honey, and disappears into the kitchen.
I negotiate the booth—the table is not built for me, which is not surprising; nothing is—and get myself arranged. Honey slides in across from me and unfolds her menu with the focused attention she gives to all things. It’s one laminated page. She studies it as if it might have changed since she was last here.
“Do you already know what you want?” I ask.
She looks up. “Yes.”
“So the menu is…”
“Decorative,” she says. “At this point.”
I laugh.
“It’s been the same since 1987,” she says. “That’s a recommendation.”
We order. She gets the chicken-fried steak; I get two of them because that’s the reality of the situation. Delia doesn’t blink at my order, and the iced tea arrives in glasses sweating in the summer air. The band has found its footing by now—fiddle leading, guitar underneath, the kind of playing that has been doing this long enough to stop thinking about it. A few couples have moved to the open floor at the far end of the room. Nobody is making a production of it. It’s just what you do here when the music starts.
Our conversation finds its footing the same way. She asks about the Taproom, the music, whether I write my own material. I tell her sometimes. She asks what kind, and I tell her, and she listens completely, with her whole attention. Somewhere in there I stop being careful because it’s too much work when someone is actually paying attention. I say something about the problem of writing songs that aren’t embarrassing, and she tilts her head and says, “What makes a song embarrassing?” I think about it.
“When you can tell the writer was more interested in how it sounded than what it meant,” I say. “When the emotion is performed rather than felt. You can always hear the difference.”
She considers this. “Can the writer hear it?”
“Sometimes not until it’s too late,” I say. “That’s the embarrassing part.”
She is, it turns out, genuinely curious about music in the way craftspeople are curious about other crafts—not performing interest, just wanting to understand how the thing works. She asks good questions. The kind that require actual answers. I find myself saying things I don’t usually say, not because she pulled them out of me but because the questions made the answers available.
“You love what you do,” she says at some point, and I realize I’ve been talking for ten minutes straight without noticing.
“Yeah,” I say. “I do.”
She nods as if a suspicion has been confirmed.
Then I ask her about the dulcimer kits she sells, and she explains the range of what she makes. Somewhere in the explanation she stops being careful, too—I can hear it, the way her voice changes register when she’s talking about the workshop as a real place rather than a professional credential. More present. More hers.
“The fact that someone in—where?” I say.
“Last week? Auckland.”
“Auckland is playing something that came out of your workshop. Must feel amazing.”
“Yes,” she says, and the word is quieter and means something else entirely.
The food arrives. The chicken-fried steak is exactly what it should be, and I tell her so.
“I’m glad my standards are achievable,” she says.
“That’s not a low bar. Gravy is easy to get wrong.”
