“You didn’t know that,” I say, and I mean it, not as absolution but as fact. He didn’t know. He can’t see the gap between what he did and what he meant to do because he doesn’t have theinformation to see it. He came in here today with love for me and sincerity and a completely sound piece of cultural logic and did something that can’t be undone.
“What can I—”
“Nothing,” I say. Not allowing myself to think through what it would look like if he tried.
He is still doing the thing with his face—the confidence gone, something careful and uncharacteristically quiet in its place. I have never seen him look small before. He is not a small person in any sense and watching it happen is not something I expected to see in my life.
He nods and drains his glass. He doesn’t say anything else, which for Grulk is its own kind of statement. After a moment he gets up and goes.
Walt comes out from the back and takes in the empty bar and then me.
“You need me?” he asks.
“No,” I say. “Go ahead.”
He studies me in that way he has, taking the whole picture in one slow read.
“She’ll hear it,” he says.
I look at him.
“Whatever it is.” He pockets his keys. “A person like that hears the real thing. Give her time to get to the part where she already knows.”
He leaves. The back door closes.
I finish the shift the way you finish things when you’re not inside them: glasses refilled, tabs run, the Thursday regulars arriving and saying what they always say. Nobody asks me anything that requires more than four words. At close, I lock up and drive home.
The dulcimer is on its stand in the living room, thevelaraflowers pale in the moonlight drifting through the window. I pull out the chair and sit and settle it across my lap—left hand on the frets, right hand open over the strings.
It’s not my instrument. ThedrathvikI learned on at twelve was built for hands like mine: wider neck, broader fret spacing, the geometry of something made for orcs. A human instrument has no reason to fit me.
But she built it to account for what I am. The neck is wider. The fret spacing accommodates my reach. She thought about my hands before I thought about them and made something that fits.
I play the song.
The whole thing, all the way through, in the empty apartment. Her grandmother’s hands. That thrown plate. The patience with which she picked up the pieces. Beyond that, the creek and theoaks and the four generations of that house around her every night, familiar the way air is familiar. Everything she told me without knowing she was handing me a song.
It sounds different on this instrument. The guitar version has a lower center of gravity: broader, more resonant, a different weight in the chest. This version is closer. It has the sound of something intimate in it, the sound of a room rather than a stage. Thevelaraflowers under my hand while I play it.
It’s the right instrument. I’ve known it for weeks without saying it directly to myself. The song belongs here.
I play it through to the end.
The last note fades.
I sit with the dulcimer in my lap in the low light, and I understand that I have made the most honest thing I have ever made and I have no idea how to give it to her now that the word ‘obligation’ is between us.
Outside, twenty-three miles east, the creek is still running.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Honey
By the time my tires hit the gravel, I’m already on the other side of what Grulk told me at the bar.
This is something I know about myself. I process fast and I process alone, and I do it in motion, which means that twenty-three miles of Missouri two-lane was enough time to have the conversation, reach the conclusion, and file it in the place where I keep decisions. The drive is behind me. The driveway is under my tires. Nothing has changed: the porch, the butter churn nobody churns butter in, the workshop lamp I left on that I’m going to have to walk back out and turn off.
The creek is running. I can hear it from the car.
