He goes down the porch steps. Stops at the bottom and looks up at me.
“Thank you for Delia’s,” he says.
“You already said that.”
“It bears repeating.”
I lean against the porch post and look at him standing in the dark at the bottom of my grandmother’s porch steps, and I think about the photograph on the wall and my grandmother’s song and his face going still while I played it. I think about what he said when he saw her face. She looks like someone who stayed.
“Goodnight, Kragen,” I say.
He looks at me with something that isn’t a smile but lives where smiles come from. “Goodnight, Honey.”
He gets in his car. I watch the headlights come on and move down the drive and disappear around the curve in the trees.
I stand on the porch for a while after, in the dark, with the crickets and the creek and the owl doing its one thing somewhere in the oaks.
Then I go inside.
Chapter Sixteen
Kragen
The apartment is dark and I’m awake and it’s not even five.
This is not unusual. I sleep four hours most nights. StillWater metabolism, something about how the body processes rest differently when the nervous system runs at a specific frequency. I’ve read about it. It doesn’t help. What’s unusual is waking up and lying here in the early-morning dark of my apartment and not going through the bar inventory or the set list or the logistics of the afternoon, which is what I normally do when sleep cuts out early.
What I do instead is lie here and think about the sound of her grandmother’s dulcimer in a lamplit room, and the stillness that came over me when she started playing, and the way she set theinstrument down on both contact points, careful, the way you set down something that has weight beyond its physical weight.
And then the other part. The part I was not prepared for.
She kissed me like she meant it. That’s the cleanest way to say it. No performance, no uncertainty, no working out what she wanted while she was doing it. She decided, and the kiss was the proof of that decision, and I have been in this bed for four hours with that knowledge, and it has not gotten quieter.
The question is quieter, though.
That’s the thing I keep arriving at and not trusting: if there were no obligation, would I still be here?
Last night the answer came so fast I didn’t finish the sentence. She had her arms around my neck in the lamplight, and the question tried to surface and couldn’t. Not because it was answered. Not because it disappeared. There was just no room for it in that moment, which feels like information even if it isn’t certainty.
I don’t know what to do with that, but it feels dangerously close to relief.
I get up at six. Make coffee. Stand at the window with it and look at Sunshine Valley going about its early morning: the light coming up over the ridge, the Taproom down the street already taking a delivery, the woman who walks her three enormous dogs at this hour every single day without exception. Normal things. I’m standing in my apartment, surrounded by normalthings, and I am not the same person who left it yesterday evening. I find I don’t mind that at all.
The dulcimer is on its stand in the corner.
I’ve been playing it in the evenings. The fretting hand is coming around. But I still reach for the guitar when I leave the apartment; the guitar goes with me, the dulcimer stays. Those are two different relationships with an instrument, and I haven’t worked out what the second one means.
I drink my coffee and examine it from across the room.
The haunting melody has been with me since the morning in her driveway after I picked it up. I’ve been carrying it for weeks, turning it over in the back of my head while I’m behind the bar, while I’m driving, in the early hours when sleep cuts out early. What I’ve been playing it on, in my head, is the guitar. The intervals work there. The melody is mine in the key of guitar because that’s the instrument I’ve been playing for eight years in a room full of people who know my name.
I put down my coffee. Cross the room. Pick up the dulcimer.
It’s lighter than the guitar. The neck is wider than a standard dulcimer, built for my hands, and it shows. I tune it the way she showed me, checking the intervals, and then I sit on the couch with it and play the melody.
It comes out different.
Not wrong. Different in the way a room sounds different when you hear it from a corner you’ve never stood in: same room, different acoustics, the same thing and also not. The dulcimer has a particular resonance, warm and old-world in a way that is its own tradition and not mine. The melody in that resonance doesn’t sound like a song I wrote. It sounds like a song that already existed somewhere, and I was just the person who found it.
