It’s a practical solution. That’s all.
I mount the first hook on the scrap wood and then the second, spacing them the way I’d space them if I were hanging tools, which is to say exactly right. I hold the piece up and look at it. Plain. Functional. The kind of thing you make when you want something to last rather than to impress.
Then I imagine how it will look on the wall next to my dulcimer and realize I’ve got this wrong. I set the board down and add a third hook, centered between the other two.
The result is deeply satisfying.
I take it inside and hear the shower running. Good. I don’t think he’ll hear me hammering.
My grandmother’s dulcimer comes down from the wall carefully, with both hands, the way it always comes down. I hold it for a moment. The wood is dark from decades of handling, its grain worn smooth under my fingers in the places where her hands always went. She played it every Sunday. It went from her hands into mine across more Sunday evenings than I can count.
I put it on the couch and get the stepstool from the kitchen.
I remove the hook from the wall and then find the studs the way I always find them—by feel, by knowledge of this house, by the resonant sound a wall makes when you knock on it in the right place. Three screws. Level. I check it twice. Then I hang my grandmother’s dulcimer in the center, where it has always been and where it will stay.
I lean back and look at the wall.
Two empty hooks. One dulcimer, centered. Space on either side for what’s coming.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Kragen
She’s not there when I reach for her.
My hand finds the space where she was and I lie still for a moment registering it and then I know—workshop, obviously, the morning light coming through the curtains and the sound of the property waking up outside and her gone before I noticed she was going, which is exactly who she is. I’m not anything except awake in her grandmother’s bed in the July morning, the ceiling with its hairline crack in the corner, her pillow still carrying her scent.
I lie here for another minute because there’s no reason not to.
Then I get up.
The house in the morning is different from the house at night. At night it’s amber and full and close—the lamplight catching the lace, the quilts over the chairs, everything warm and contained. In the morning, it’s open. The light comes through the windows differently, finding the grain of the oak floors and the dust motes and the places where generations of living have worn the finish soft. It’s the same house. It’s entirely different.
I come down the stairs with my hand on the newel post—oak, old, turned smooth in the way wood gets when the same hands have touched the same place for a century. I feel the grain of it under my palm. File it.
In the living room, I stop.
The piano is against the wall between the two windows, an upright, dark wood gone nearly black with age, the kind of instrument that has been in this room so long it’s become part of the architecture. I’ve walked past it a dozen times. This morning I cross to it.
I press one key. Middle C, I think, or close to it. The sound it makes is slightly imperfect from age and humidity and probably decades without tuning, and it is the best sound I’ve heard all morning, which is saying something given what I woke up remembering.
I want to learn this instrument. I have wanted to learn it since the first time I stood in this room and saw it. There was not much call for pianos at the orc compound—one battered upright at the community center, keys yellowed, no one who could teachit properly, a human instrument that was donated by some organization.
I’m going to ask Honey where to find a teacher. After I figure out what we’re going to do about the stool.
I look at the piano stool. It is, in the kindest possible assessment, a Victorian artifact with claw feet gripping small glass balls and a spindle mechanism for adjusting the height, built for a parlor and a person of entirely different dimensions than myself. It is also clearly something that has been in this room for as long as the piano and possibly longer. I am not going to simply replace it.
The workshop will have a solution. Honey will have a solution. She has a solution for everything, including, apparently, me.
I touch the corner of the lace curtain on my way to the kitchen. The fabric is soft from washing, the pattern intricate, each repeat exactly like the last because her great-grandmother made it that way, by hand, in this house, before anyone now living was born. I think about the song. I think about the verse I wrote and whether it came anywhere near the reality of standing in this room with this lace between my fingers.
It didn’t. Nothing could.
I go upstairs to shower. I’m thinking I’ll make coffee after, take it out to the workshop, and find her at the bench with whatever she’s working on.
Halfway through, I hear the hammering.
I come downstairs in a towel, my hair dripping.
